VPN boosts user consistency

Charity gets flexible netwroking infrastructure

UK charity Shaw Trust is investing £2.5m in a four-year, managed services contract to provide a converged virtual private network.

The organisation, which represents people who are disadvantaged in the job market, is hoping the network will deliver up to 30 per cent in costs savings and provide increased bandwidth, performance and reliability.

Gavin Megnauth, IT director of Shaw Trust, says rapid growth, coupled with a heavily distributed structure of 250 homeworkers, 65 offices and various standalone firms, has left it with no consistent IT network.

‘All these sites and staff have varying connectivity,’ he said. ‘Managing this complexity with no standardisation caused difficulties with running costs.’

Vendor Sirocom will provide and manage the network covering the 1,300-strong user group, with free voice over IP calls, media rich services, and more effective network management tools.