Anchor Moves Towards Cloud-based Infrastructure With BT

LONDON, December 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Anchor, England's largest not-for-profit provider of housing and care to older people, has moved to BT's managed Infrastructure-as-a Service (IaaS) platform, BT Managed Compute.

With BT Managed Compute, Anchor now has a flexible, scalable and resilient platform in place to allow it to 'flex' services to meet evolving business and customer demands. This also means that Anchor colleagues will have reduced IT down-time giving even more time to care for Anchor's customers.

The platform, developed, operated and managed by BT Engage IT, one of the IT Services arms of BT Business, gives customers the ability to rationalise their infrastructure and move some or all of their IT estate over to the managed service.

BT Managed Compute provides customers with the expertise, as well as the computing, network, security and support technology and services they need in order to ensure they have the right systems in place to support their company's business objectives and their 'cloud journey'.

BT Cloud Experts will work closely with customers in order to tailor the services to their exact requirements. Once the systems are set up, because they are provided as a service, customers have the flexibility to switch on extra capacity as they need it. This means that businesses can be more agile in responding to changing market conditions, whether structural or seasonal.

Alistair Stevenson, Head of IT Operations, Anchor, said: "Moving to BT Managed Compute has provided us with far greater flexibility and resilience than with our previous infrastructure.  What that means in practice is that we now have the capability to flex services with minimum disruption to our customers, while allowing for the introduction of new capabilities, for example, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).  It also allows us to provide the same high-level 24/7 service as we always have, but with the added ability to react to changing requirements more quickly and shift resources accordingly."

Rich Lowe, Chief Executive Officer, BT Engage IT, said: "Analysts are already saying that IaaS is taking over from traditional data centre outsourcing, and more than three quarters of UK businesses will have moved to a private and hybrid model as part of their core IT infrastructure within the next three years.  We've developed a scalable platform in order to help companies like Anchor move over to cloud-based infrastructure as painlessly as possible, no matter where they are in their cloud journey.  This adds to the BT Private Compute and BT Cloud Compute offerings that make up the BT Compute family, and means that we can deliver the exact services customers need, without the capital outlay and risk traditionally associated with infrastructure projects."

For further information about to BT Managed Compute, visit http://www.btengageit.com/cloud_BTManagedCompute.html