‘It means we can focus on our core business’

PARTICK Housing Association (PHA) owns, manages and rents almost 1700 flats, while its trading subsidiary, Partick Works, delivers a factoring service to more than 2000 customers.

Faced with increasing challenges, such as finding the funding to fill the hole left by the government’s retreat from the housing market, PHA took the decision to optimise its existing resources and create a robust IT infrastructure.

After a detailed tendering process, PHA opted for a fully managed, hosted solution from Castle Computer Services.

Key to the win, from Castle’s perspective, was the detailed hosted-readiness assessment and evaluation of the potential for private cloud computing undertaken by Castle staff.

Commenting on the decision to opt for cloud services, Arlene Casey, ICT manager at PHA, said: “The move to a fully hosted private cloud service enables us to focus on our core business.

“One of the challenges we had before was identifying which third-party supplier was responsible whenever we had an IT issue. All of this is now managed by Castle.

“They provide a single point of contact for all of our IT requirements through their service desk.

“We now have a high-performance, secure infrastructure for our sensitive personal tenant and company data, which is scalable and resilient.”

George Strathie, software and services director for Castle Computer Services, said: “We developed a solution that has been specifically tailored to meet all Partick Housing Association’s business needs.

“We were able to demonstrate the total cost-of-ownership benefits that follow from moving from an on-premises solution to a private cloud.”