CASE STUDY - THE PRINCESS ALICE HOSPICE

The Princess Alice Hospice is a charitable organisation which provides specialist services for terminally ill patients and to provide support for their family and friends.

The Challenge

Princess Alice Hospice's offices are spread over three sites. The main site is situated in Esher; another office is based approximately two miles down the road and a third at Kingston hospital. In addition to the offices, it has a number of charity shops, which are situated all around the south east of England. The Hospice required a fast and reliable means of communication between staff across the sites.

In a growing organisation such as The Princess Alice Hospice it is imperative that communication and data is maintained and provided to and by staff efficiently with the current and most accurate information. In addition to this, it was necessary to allow individual connectivity for roaming users. The advantage of this is that each site can be accessed by IT administrators on a site-by-site basis for general maintenance on local machines.

The Solution

IT Architechture Ltd, with many years experience in setting up wide area networks, advised the Princess Alice Hospice on this project and decided on the intY Exoserver box. The intY exoserver introduced a complete Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution. VPN technology allows communication between sites using the internet as the carrier, rather than expensive leased lines. In essence, VPN allows organisations to use the internet as though it were a Wide Area Network connecting sites together. The intY Exoserver provides all this connectivity with the added assurance of high security, firewall technology and data encryption to prevent internet hackers from gaining access.

The Benefits

The original expectations of the IntY Exoserver and the full potential was finally realised by IT administrators when they discovered that although this solution provided the VPN connection and security as the main focus for their requirements, the additional functionality that it provided meant that using a connection manager, internal users can be controlled in terms of Internet connection and the URL's that they can visit. The control could be time dependent and limited to lunch periods or during break times.

To learn more about VPN Networking, please contact ITA.