Family Mosaic has signed a new agreement with Telstra to deliver IT service efficiencies across its organisation. As part of the agreement, Telstra is providing high-speed MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) network connectivity and secure hosting facilities for the Family Mosaic server farms which serve seven major sites and more than 80 smaller Family Mosaic offices. The agreement also includes the deployment and management of firewalls as all internet connectivity is accessed via the hosting centre.
Nick Crane, network manager, Family Mosaic, said, “We are one of the largest housing associations in the UK so it is vital that employees can access our applications all of the time. Moving to Telstra has enabled us to implement and deliver against strict service-level agreements.
“Furthermore, by using Telstra to manage our network, we are in a very strong position; the social housing market is very active at the moment and the new infrastructure makes it easy to integrate new offices.”
Telstra and Family Mosaic worked together to design a next-generation network service, with an MPLS virtual private network replacing X21 point-to-point connections. All major sites are connected via high-capacity connections, with the smaller sites having ADSL Max connections. This implementation doubles Family Mosaic’s network capacity without increasing its operational costs.
Simon Vye, CEO, Telstra EMEA, said, “At a time when all organisations are thinking about how they can reduce IT spend, the cloud-computing approach offers a way of managing investment and operational costs.”
In outsourcing its entire IT server infrastructure to Telstra’s London datacentre, Family Mosaic has also mitigated its previous disaster recovery exposures, increasing the security and availability of all systems.
