Managed 24/7, the award-winning managed service provider, has been appointed by the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) to deliver a single IT hosting solution including hosting, communications, backup and support for its global network, spanning 400 employees. The three-year contract was awarded during a competitive pitch process.

CIPD is the professional body for experts in people at work. For over 100 years, CIPD has championed better work and working lives by setting professional standards for HR and people development, as well as driving positive change in the world of work. The multi-faceted institute has global offices and employs around 400 staff, with a reported annual turnover of approximately £40 million.

The managed IT system that Managed 24/7 has designed for CIPD will be delivered from its multi‑award‑winning Service Desk in Milton Keynes. The solution takes a dedicated Hybrid Cloud approach, with a combination of its Managed IT support, OneCare service, and its OneViewomnipresent IT monitoring and analytics, focused on delivering ITIL accredited services.

Rather than migrate the existing shared Cloud service to public cloud (IaaS) approach, which would have involved CIPD migrating the current infrastructure into a public hosted environment such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, Managed 24/7 designed a dedicated hybrid cloud solution.

CIPD will now be able to grow its range of products and services on demand at no additional expense whilst also delivering an integrated infrastructure, providing services that are over 10 times faster, increasing ROI and capacity to grow the current infrastructure services by over 40%. The model is due to go live in the next four to eight weeks.

Stephen Boardman, Commercial Director at Managed 24/7 said

“We are delighted to have been chosen by CIPD to deliver an improved set of IT Infrastructure services at such an exciting time for the organisation. The CIPD is looking for a partnership beyond the traditional customer-supplier relationship and this is what 24/7 stands for as a business.

“We will work with CIPD to continually ensure that its technology is strategically aligned to current and future business needs and ensure that the organisation is utilising and optimising IT as a tool to increase productivity, profitability, and ultimately end user happiness.

“The support service will be aligned to our unique Resolution Based SLA’s, providing reassurance that any issues will be reacted to and fixed within a set time period, removing the frustration and downtime associated with traditional reaction-based SLA’s.”

Last year Managed 24/7 commissioned a study in partnership with YouGov, entitled The UK’s productivity crisis and IT, which found that UK productivity is down from 2.2% to 0.5% since the recession in 2009. The study found that the average UK employee loses on average 5.59 per cent of their total working time due to IT issues. This equates to more than one working day per four-week month and an average loss per year, per employee of £1,499 – a total cost to the economy of £35 billion per annum.

Boardman continued,

“It is our mission at Managed 24/7 to combat the growing productivity crisis that we are facing in the UK by implementing single service solutions that provide tangible financial benefits to businesses and increase productivity and efficiency throughout.”

Simon Beesley, Infrastructure & Operations Manager at CIPD said

“Managed 24/7 provided us with a clear and effective workable solution, wrapped in a single service that will take the CIPD into the next phase of its business growth and allow our network of global staff to be more productive, more efficient, all within a safe and secure private cloud.”