Railway Housing Association has reported that it has cut its IT costs by 30 per cent since it moved its infrastructure to a fully-managed cloud service from Civica.
Railway Housing’s relationship with Civica dates back to 2001; at that time, it was technologically stuck in the past and required new systems that could help run its business more efficiently while delivering better tenant services.
Implementing new systems and deploying them to multiple offices, some of which were tiny, would have created a huge cost burden. The company would have had to buy and house new hardware, license and install the applications, create a wide area network to allow remote access, and manage, support and upgrade all of this on an ongoing basis. With no IT staff in place, that would also have meant hiring a small team of IT professionals.
Railway Housing knew that it would make more sense to partner with a managed services provider rather than build its own modern infrastructure from scratch. Since the main system it had chosen to license was Civica’s suite of housing applications, it moved its IT infrastructure to Civica on a managed service basis.
Stuart Bradon, finance and ICT manager, Railway Housing Association, said, “Over the years we have developed a great partnership with Civica but we’re also pragmatic – if someone else was offering the same service at a lower price, we would go for it. In the end, Civica came out on top commercially, and it also has a great insight into our business.”
After having completed the migration to Civica’s hosted service, Railway Housing then commissioned an independent consultant to carry out a cost comparison between Civica’s outsourced cloud service and bringing it back in-house.
Bradon said, “When we saw the results, it was a very easy decision. The consultancy found that by outsourcing our environment to Civica, we had saved around 30 per cent of the cost of managing the same infrastructure in-house.
“Civica has enabled us to focus on our core business. We have the modern systems we need without having to employ an IT team – and as we plan future enhancements and upgrades we know the infrastructure and services are there to support them. That’s one less thing to worry about.”
