Teamsolve helps Metropolitan Police Friendly Society (MPFS) achieve high availability & guarantee business continuity
The Metropolitan Police Friendly Society (MPFS) is an organisation dedicated to providing financial services for officers and staff of the Metropolitan and City of London Police Services and their families.
After installing a new modern architecture in October 2006 - MPFS wanted a best value support solution that could minimise the risk of downtime whilst improving the overall performance of their systems, without having to take on more staff.
Teamsolve first engaged with MPFS in February 2007 - initially undertaking a series of Health Checks to assess their current infrastructure and recommend a system strategy going forward:
Network - a comprehensive review of the underlying Network and Hardware, fault tolerance and resilience.
Oracle Technology - a technical appraisal of the existing Oracle database and benchmarking it against Oracle best practice in terms of performance, resilience, security, and disaster recovery.
Application - a review of the Policy Management System - an in-house developed Java based application - to review code, development environments, naming conventions and security.
Teamsolve Support
After re-assessing their changing business requirements, Teamsolve are providing a more pro-active support contract - giving MPFS peace of mind that key systems will remain live in the event of a problem. Operating on a 2nd line support basis and defaulting to 1st line support during periods of employee absenteeism - this partnership has given them significant reinforcement of highly skilled resource - to be available when they need it most.
Support not only covers their Oracle database and mission critical Policy Management System, but also a robust hardware maintenance contract that includes vital servers covered under a 4 hour repair or replace agreement. This flexibility has allowed MPFS to maximise their value for money, giving the peace of mind that in the case of serious error they can call on Teamsolve to help. Also, when members of the internal team are absent, it also maintains a supreme standard of infrastructure administration ensuring there's no change in service level metrics or system availability.
Why Teamsolve?
David Hurcomb, IT Manager said: "Our aim from the outset was to identify a well respected Oracle partner who could offer a one stop support and development solution for our individual set of circumstances."
With a highly skilled and committed development team already in place, MPFS saw in Teamsolve a provider that could dovetail into their existing team and complement their IT operations perfectly.
"Teamsolve took the time understand how our business works, and their flexibility is key to driving our IT strategy forward into the future" David added.
Compliance & Security
One of MPFS' primary objectives was to satisfy the strict compliance regulations of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and provide business continuity in the event of IT outage at the Hardware, Software, and Personnel level. A number of Health Check recommendations have been implemented by Teamsolve to address this - including a more robust backup and disaster recovery environment and a highly effective monitoring solution.
David continued: "Compliance is such a hugely important subject in financial services at the moment and Teamsolve are helping us to satisfy FSA requirements by delivering a series of industry leading solutions."
Other Health Check recommendations that have been successfully implemented over the past few months include a new email system, the creation of a third development environment and the installation of a new version control solution.