Microsoft Support Partner – Hanover Housing Association

Hanover Scotland, a charitable housing association managing more than 5,000 homes, needed additional expertise to support its large user base and complex IT infrastructure. With a small internal IT team, Hanover selected Bridgeall as its Microsoft support partner.

Bridgeall provides a bank of hours that Hanover can draw down for Microsoft support and consultancy, covering infrastructure, Microsoft servers, Azure and the wider Microsoft estate. This gives Hanover flexible access to specialist advice, stronger resilience and additional technical capacity, all through a single, cost effective arrangement that matches the light touch support they were looking for.

Hanover Housing Association

Hanover (Scotland) Housing Association, known as Hanover Scotland, is a charitable registered social landlord based at 95 McDonald Road, Edinburgh. Operating across Scotland, it specialises in housing and support for older people.

Hanover Housing manages more than 5,000 homes, including retirement, sheltered, very sheltered, amenity, general needs and housing with care properties. Its services include community alarms, repairs, maintenance, home adaptations, personal care and property factoring.

The organisation aims to help older people live safely, independently and confidently within their communities. It works with residents, local authorities and care partners to provide affordable homes, flexible support and opportunities for residents to influence services.

Challenges

Hanover Housing Association has a fairly large user base and infrastructure setup and was looking for additional support and resource to help manage this.

Combined with a small IT team, it became clear that the best way for them to future proof their resources and deal with any issues was by augmenting their existing team with an external Microsoft support partner. They were looking for a cost effective approach that combined the benefits of access to expert resource with a light touch to match their requirements.

Hanover is also part way through a major infrastructure consolidation, reducing their server estate from over one hundred servers down to around 10 to 15, alongside a wider move of services into public cloud SaaS platforms and Azure. This shift adds a further layer of complexity that made specialist Microsoft support all the more valuable.

Microsoft Support Service

Bridgeall was selected as the Microsoft support partner for Hanover Housing Association, providing a bank of Microsoft technical support and consultancy hours. Requests are managed initially by Hanover’s internal IT team and escalated to Bridgeall where advanced 2nd and 3rd line resolution is needed, with defined response times for critical, high priority and standard issues.

The same bank of hours flexes to cover both day to day support and more focused consultancy style work. On the support side, this means troubleshooting and resolution across Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server and Azure hybrid infrastructure. On the consultancy side, examples of work delivered through the bank include a review of Hanover’s disaster recovery plan and advisory and implementation work relating to domain controllers.

Consultancy days

Bridgeall is also on hand to provide expert consultancy as Hanover progresses its server consolidation and cloud migration programme, supporting the move to public cloud SaaS and Azure as and when this is required.

This single bank of hours approach keeps costs predictable while giving Hanover the flexibility to use the time as their priorities change, whether that’s an urgent fix or a planned piece of infrastructure work.

At Bridgeall we provide IT Support for housing associations. We support a wide range of housing associations such as Southside Housing, Atrium Homes, Link Group, Gloucester City Homes and more. Our service is tailored to your needs and offers proactive advice and support. To learn more about our IT Support for Housing Associations services, contact us to get a quote today.