Our relationship with Kick is central to ensuring our business operations and finances are, from a technology perspective, operating efficiently.The upgrade project from NAV to Business Central was thorough, well planned and well executed, allowing us to continue focussing on providing a great service to our customers, safe in the knowledge that we are operating from a secure, scalable and modern technology platform.

We’re delighted to have been able to make excellent progress in the upgrade our finance applications and to do so using modern, safe and secure hosting facilities. The Castle team within Kick have been in continual contact since the onset of Covid-19 and the lockdown measures and we look forward to working with them remotely or otherwise in the weeks and months to come.

We were operating with a potential single point of failure in Glasgow so that a quite simple fault could knock out all of our servers. We wanted to upgrade the network and introduce robust disaster resilience. Our staff provide a 24/7 care service and require access to the system at all times of day and night.
After discussing and reviewing various options with Castle, we implemented a co-location solution, retaining ownership of the infrastructure hardware and software licenses. This approach was significantly cheaper for us than a full Cloud solution whilst delivering the resilience of having our hardware in a secure data centre.
To give previously unparalleled disaster resilience we also implemented Castle’s Disaster Recovery service. With this we can have systems back online in just a few hours in the event of a critical failure. We have completely removed the reliance on our administrative centre in Glasgow so that users across the rest of the country are not affected by any day to day maintenance or local issues.
We have a longstanding relationship with Castle and their understanding of our system requirements and organisational needs were a significant factor in what was a seamless implementation. We now have a flexible but robust system that enables us to run our IT systems on a fixed budget.

Our infrastructure was at an age where it needed to be upgraded in advance of our move to new offices and Castle worked with us to ensure that the upgrade and the move would be as efficient as possible.
They worked with us in preparation and planning so that the new infrastructure was installed ready for a pick and lift on moving day. The planning paid off as we moved over a weekend and had full IT systems up and running by Monday lunchtime, causing minimum disruption to service.
All of our hardware is located on one site and despite data backups every day off site, we wanted a more flexible and robust disaster recovery solution. Castle’s Disaster Recovery as a Service meets our needs and provides robust business continuity that ensures we can have the system up and running within hours if there is a critical event. It works seamlessly and if our service goes down we can boot from the cloud and continue day to day operations, giving us peace of mind that in the worst case scenario we can still operate from anywhere and maintain customer service, even from home, within a few hours.
We do not operate an IT department of our own and work with Castle as a strategic partner. They provide all the necessary IT support on an ongoing basis at a fixed rate and have always managed new implementations effectively with careful planning and minimal disruption.

We were looking for a competitive solution that would protect our data and offer scalability to support all of our users.
Castle’s DRaaS solution meets all of our needs going forward by replicating our data to a secure off site location with a verification process which confirms that it is recoverable. The service includes an annual Disaster Recovery test and enables full recovery and access for all staff within one working day of a critical incident.
The standby features of DRaaS allow for continuous high availability to a virtual infrastructure on an incremental basis, which minimises the recovery time.
Our highest priority is to provide a quality service to our tenants and stakeholders and that requires robust disaster recovery arrangements at the core of our business continuity plan. Castle’s DRaaS solution gives the organisation confidence that we have mitigated effectively against the consequences of a critical incident so that there would be minimal impact on our service. We know that our data and systems are safe and recoverable using secure proven technology and a regime of annual review and testing provides additional peace of mind.

Castle’s managed service gives us complete peace of mind that on a day to day basis our systems and data are secure and operating at the most efficient levels. We also have the confidence that it is future proofed for at least the next five years, and more than meets all of the needs that we set out in the original brief for the project.
Our colleagues can now access the system securely from our offices and from home and it will look exactly the same. This brings much greater flexibility and efficiency, which ultimately allows us to provide a higher quality service to our tenants, and other customers.
Castle worked closely with our IT team throughout every stage of the project, ensuring a smooth and effective implementation.

Castle developed Qlik to meet the exact needs of our business and it is now the foundation from which our
strategic decisions are made.
We also use Castle’s Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution, which Castle implemented a number of years ago to better manage business processes and workflows. Castle developed Qlik to meet the exact needs of our business and it is now the foundation from which our strategic decisions are made.

We have enjoyed a successful working relationship with Castle for a number of years. Projects are carefully planned, managed and documented, giving us reassurance that we are in good hands. The project was delivered on time and on budget and managed in such a way that there was very little downtime, allowing us to provide an uninterrupted service to our tenants.

Having identified a need for better reporting, we undertook a review of the market and as part of the process had a look at what other housing organisations were doing. We had the opportunity to see QlikView in action and after attending a Castle user day opted for their QlikView solution.
Initially we introduced QlikView to provide KPI reports for the senior management team, but Castle spent considerable time working with us to implement it in other areas of operations, such as HR and performance management.
The process has seen the accuracy of our data improve significantly and our staff have a clear understanding of how information needs to be recorded. Outcomes and client demographics are much more accessible than before and the quality of information
informs decision making across the organisation. The quality of information has improved and the whole process for preparing reports is much more efficient. The senior management team love the way that information is presented and find it very easy to understand.
Castle worked closely with our team to support the implementation and any issues were quickly addressed and resolved.