The Client

The Client

Tŷ Hafan is one of the UK’s leading paediatric palliative care charities and offers care and support to children with life-limiting conditions and their families in Wales, in the hospice, in the community and their homes so they can make the most of the time they have left together. 

Every year Tŷ Hafan must raise £4.5 million to provide its free services to families in Wales. Since registering as a charity in 1990 through to fully opening in 1999, there is now a purpose-built children’s hospice in Sully near Cardiff and they employ over 200 staff and have over 20 retail stores.   

The Background

The Background

With legacy core infrastructure services and out of date operating systems along with the changing behaviour in how the staff were interacting with the systems, Tŷ Hafan needed a solution to transform the IT function to better support the modern demands of the organisation.  The facility in Sully is a 24/7 operation and a service with resilience was required.  

Tŷ Hafan required a technology stack that could host critical lines of business applications, ensure the IT function was secure and could be accessed by staff irrespective of the location or device.  

With access to donated funds and concessions for Microsoft 365 services, Tŷ Hafan needed assistance in the design of a solution built using best of breed cloud computing and taking advantage of the licensing that was available.

The Service

The Service

CSG worked with stakeholders to identify Tŷ Hafan’s requirements, assessed the on-premises environment and scoped Microsoft Azure resources for the delivery of the IT service. The technical solutions lead liaised with third-party vendors and design a solution based around the Microsoft Cloud.

The core design was designed around Azure compute, storage, and network resources.  Azure virtual machines provide directory, SQL, application file share and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for end-user computing interaction. 

The Azure section of service delivery is inclusive of the build of the subscription, planning and migration of several workloads, configuration of the storage accounts, configuration of virtual machines and completion of security aligned work. 

For end-user compute and delivery, CSG designed a custom solution around Azure Virtual Desktop, where the Tŷ Hafan staff would access line of business applications via a cloud-hosted windows 10 multi-session look and feel desktop. The AVD service is provided on a per-user basis and important network shares, applications, MS 365 services and data are contained within a secure and controlled desktop experience.  This service is available to Tŷ Hafan staff via the internet and accessible via any device, any location. 

From a security perspective, CSG configured the Azure VPN service for network security, site to site and point to site VPN services, authentication requirements and completed further advanced security hardening of the MS Azure tenant for identity-based security.  Sophos Intercept X provided Virtual Machine and Desktop local security, protecting the services against next-generation security threats, such as ransomware, malware, and anti-exploit kits. 

The environment is protected and backed according to client requirements, with a daily, weekly, and monthly snapshot. 

Microsoft Intune policies were created for the management of the mobile device estate and to standardise builds of machines, to ease the burden on new equipment provisioning for staff.  

Deprecation of the legacy infrastructure on-premise was managed via the team and removal of now unneeded existing complexities.  Configuration of a base level on-premise IT function operating domain controller, print and Azure AD connect services to integrate into the Microsoft Cloud were completed to best practices.

The Result

The Result 

Tŷ Hafan is now operating an optimised and secure environment for sharing their line of business applications between staff.  The environment operates on Microsoft Azure and uses best in class compute, storage, network, and security technologies. 

The day-to-day interaction with the service is monitored and supported by CSG’s ServiceDesk, ensuring uptime and availability for the organisation. Any end-user support related incidents are catered for with an all-inclusive telephone and remote support service. 

The Testimonial

The Testimonial

“We have worked with CSG for a number of years and know the value of the relationship. It was clear our systems were soon to become non-compliant, ageing and really not fit for purpose.  Moving to the Microsoft Cloud has removed a large number of performance issues and provides our staff with a more current and available IT function. 

The cloud migration project was handled professionally and we are extremely happy with the overall solution and service from the team at CSG.”