Charity Together For Mental Wellbeing Transforms IT Infrastructure

Mental health charity Together For Mental Wellbeing has successfully migrated its old server room to a virtual datacentre (VDC) hosted by Node4, solving a major disaster recovery (DR) issue.

Funded by the NHS and local authorities, the charity offers community support, supported housing, 24-hour residential accommodation, advocacy, and assistance for those experiencing mental distress in criminal justice settings such as courts and on probation.

The migration involved moving applications from the charity’s physical server infrastructure to a virtual environment and establishing secure connectivity to certain NHS applications. The process had to be completed in less than four months.

IT manager Hiten Patel, who joined Together for Mental Wellbeing in April 2022, conducted a risk assessment of the server room and discovered that the IT infrastructure was outdated and the disaster recovery DR site was hosted in a building owned by the NHS. As a result, the charity had to vacate the premises.

Nonetheless, Patel found it fortuitous that the main server room was located on a site owned by the charity, but the IT infrastructure was outdated. The servers ran Hyper-V with various corporate applications and file storage, with hardware and firewalls that had reached end of life.

Patel’s risk assessment raised alarm bells in the executive team over the lack of security, prompting him to decide that it would be more cost-effective to have the servers hosted in a virtual datacentre provided by Node4.