The Client
London & Partners is the Mayor of London’s official promotional agency. Their mission is to tell London’s story to an international audience. They support the Mayor’s priorities by promoting London internationally, as the best city in the world in which to invest, work, study and visit. They are a not-for-profit public-private partnership, funded by the Mayor of London and their network of commercial partners.
The Challenge
A long-term strategic approach to devise network solutions across the London & Partners infrastructure. They were looking for a partner to device a plan to replace their entire network, including stripping out and replacing their security firewall. The client was also looking for much closer integration with their other third party suppliers, such as their telephony system partner.
The Solution
Steve Smith, Head of IT brought us in to install a new LAN to provide greater stability, scale, a faster network and a much more streamlined topography for management and control. New connectivity was needed for the office in order to improve customer service, reduce cost and improve available bandwidth.
We implemented new, hosted firewall topography to provide resilience and improved options to ensure business continuity.
Making use of a ‘private cloud’ facility enabled alternative options to infrastructure deployments in the future.
Transition was closely managed, completed over a weekend and while there was a great deal of work to do, the project discipline and technical planning meant it went without major incident.
Steve very much enjoys the level of account management, engagement and partnership – backed by our highly skilled technical resources – something he was looking for from the relationship.
STEVE SMITH, HEAD OF IT, LONDON & PARTNERS SAYS…
“London & Partners was looking to overhaul its entire system. We went to tender with five companies ranging from the largest in the marketplace to smaller businesses like Astro. Astro instilled the most amount of confidence – they looked at the whole organisation, listened to us and really understood what we needed. The solution they provided was state of the art, but for the right reasons – because it was needed and appropriate, not just for the sake of having new technology. I have been impressed with their future-proof, long term solution and am now working with them in relation to ‘bring your own device’ solutions and other initiatives.”