RIBA Enterprises, the knowledge business of the Royal Institute of British Architects, has become Redstone’s latest customer to go-live with its cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform. The service is one of the first VMware vCloud Powered services in the UK. RIBA Enterprises, already a long-standing customer of Redstone, is using IaaS to support its web environments. It is likely to save in excess of £100,000 in IT maintenance and hardware costs over the next three years.
RIBA Enterprises has signed a three-year contract with Redstone to provide virtual machines each month to support its online business, which provides Specification Software, on-line Information Systems, CPD training, physical and on-line bookstores, library services, and recruitment services to its members in the construction, architecture and built environment sectors. RIBA Enterprises is able to self-provision more capacity as and when required, in as little time as 15 minutes.
John Roberts, head of managed services at Redstone says, “We’ve had a strong, long-term relationship with RIBA Enterprises for whom we’ve provided managed and co-location services in the past. When RIBA Enterprises were looking to refresh their physical infrastructure, it made sense to virtualise the environment so they can align IT resources with customer needs. The cloud service gives RIBA Enterprises a flexible platform that allows them to grow as their business requires, whilst paying for only the resources that they use.”
Mark Warnock, Business Systems Manager at RIBA Enterprises adds, “The move to virtualised hosting made perfect sense to us; virtualisation dramatically reduces our costs and provides levels of flexibility and resilience that we simply could not have afforded with physical machines. Redstone has been a true partner of RIBA Enterprises working closely in the migration from physical to virtual hosting. In addition Redstone has been extremely responsive when we have required enhanced server capacity at short notice to respond to increased customer demand. Since going virtual, RIBA Enterprises has been able to expand our web farm literally within an hour, a speed that would simply have been impossible with physical machines.”
Redstone’s IaaS is provided through its five UK-based data centres and the company will offer a location guarantee policy for UK companies who need to meet and comply with current data protection regulation.
Redstone guarantees the service’s resilience and to ensure that critical data can be managed ‘as a service’ delivers it via shared firewall and switching technology. It is also built to FSA, DPA and PCI-DSS standards – a critical consideration for UK companies considering cloud infrastructure. To reduce risk further, Redstone also operates a sixth data centre in Amsterdam as back up.