17 June 2020

The Witherslack Group is a provider of specialist education and care for children and young people with social, emotional and mental health needs, communication difficulties, ADHD and complex learning needs.

It was seeking an efficient, safe and streamlined way of hosting data across all its sites.

This was driven by poor performance of its existing platform and the fact that several schools experienced server issues and downtime, which impacted on operations.

Witherslack Group had specific security and compliance requirements around the data it held.

In addition to education records, individual schools and care homes are also responsible for storing medical information.

Pulsant worked with the Witherslack Group’s IT team to refine the project’s requirements and find a solution that met the need for resilience, performance and availability.

The Pulsant team designed, developed and implemented a private cloud solution for Witherslack and the relationship has flourished ever since.

“Pulsant is very solutions focused, finding ways to help us overcome our IT challenges, while offering excellent levels of consultancy, from the account management team, to the technical team,” explains Stephen Hall, IT director at Witherslack Group.

Based on these requirements, Pulsant delivered a hosted private cloud platform for the education group that enables the organisation to manage and support all IT needs from a centralised location.

In addition, with an installed wide-area network (WAN), individual sites have better access to the data they need. This is especially important given that some sites, such as the children’s homes, run 24 hours a day.

The relationship between Witherslack Group and Pulsant is ongoing, with the cloud provider assisting in an overall hardware refresh, as well as continuing to deliver support and provide expert consultancy.

This is especially relevant in an evolving education environment where traditional teaching methods have changed in the last few years and new solutions have had to be implemented to adjust to the shifting demands.

A case in point is the recent rise in the use of video in education. Witherslack Group worked with Pulsant to ensure it had the right infrastructure in place to support video streaming and the solutions to support these operational changes.

“As a centralised IT team, we deal with over 45 sites in the group and our needs are constantly evolving,” concludes Hall.