HTG has been supporting Clarion Housing’s massive ongoing migration of around 4,200 users to its new technology infrastructure.
Following a merger between Circle Housing and Affinity Sutton, Clarion Housing was formed, resulting in the UK largest housing provider with around 125,000 homes. Clarion’s objective is now to build 50,000 homes over the next decade.
Clarion approached technology specialists HTG in March 2019 when it wanted to embark on a major IT migration. The project was split into two phases; the first phase was to migrate all users whose Active Directory (AD) presence was currently on the legacy domain over to Clarion’s new strategic domain and provide them with up to date, secure hardware. The second phase was to configure the remaining accounts that were already on the strategic domain and provide them with the relevant hardware aligned to their different roles.
HTG was initially tasked with tailoring the solution to ensure users could access the relevant parts of the system (mainly Windows 10-based CRM and ERP applications) while minimising effort and risk, in advance of the second phase.
Phase one of ‘Project Unity’ involved HTG carrying out a Clarion build and deployment across multiple Clarion sites, comprising 480 laptops, 500 thin clients and 230 iPads while minimising any compromises in the users’ experience.
Out of almost 4,200 users in total, the first phase of Clarion’s six-month project involved migrating around 1,900 users. The remaining 2,300 users will be migrated as part of Clarion’s wider infrastructure integration during phase two.
HTG’s services for Clarion’s Project Unity include the provision of standard processes (such as joiner, leaver and mover scenarios), training, plus early adopter and post-migration support. Since the migration, HTG has halved users’ log-on times from 30 seconds to 13 seconds, and the average session latency has fallen from 108ms to 54ms.
Sam Brown, head of IT operations and infrastructure, Clarion Housing, said, “HTG has proven to be a valuable and trusted partner on this large project. HTG was engaged relatively late in the day but quickly embedded themselves in our teams and brought the focus and structure needed to deliver on time. Key to this was the way HTG quickly understood the organisation and culture they were working within – this ultimately led to a very successful delivery in the eyes of our wider business.”
