Myhomemove improves home resiliency with Databarracks
Databarracks’ case study
Myhomemove improves resilieny with Databarracks
About myhomemove Founded in 2001, myhomemove helps around 50,000 people each year to buy, sell and remortgage their homes. In 2011, they were the first UK organisation to attain an Alternative Business Structures license to operate in the UK. Today, they empower over 700 staff to provide an innovative, technology-led service to clients.
The Challenge Moving house is widely regarded as one of the most stressful lifetime events we go through today. myhomemove’s mission is to make this complex and intensive legal process easier for clients by providing unparalleled levels of customer service through the innovative application of technology. For instance, myhomemove connects with its customers through a blend of traditional correspondence and newer, technology-led channels.
“eWay is our client portal, and it’s a cornerstone of our technology-led approach. Traditionally law firms would print out starter packs to send to clients, which they’d read, sign and return. That was a costly process. Today, we can have a starter pack ready for the client to view, sign and send back through eWay within an hour of them accepting our quotation.” – Paul Tennant, IT Director
This increased reliance on technology necessarily increased theprospective cost of IT downtime. myhomemove’s legacy tape-based disaster recovery solution became increasingly unsuitable for protecting its business-critical assets.
Ultimately this proved to be incompatible for their customercentric approach.
“At this size we simply have to be available 24/7 – our customers expect to be able to go online and use our systems, such as the client portal, at any time, and from any place. It’s essential for our partnering organisations too – at any point we might be dealing with a long chain of other law firms, mortgage brokers and estate agents.” – Paul Tennant
“Databarracks adapted our replication strategy to support our new way of storing data.” – Paul Tennant Databarracks’ project management and service delivery teams worked to establish how myhomemove’s various services were distributed across its technology infrastructure.
“Databarracks’ attention to detail really impressed me – particularly during setup. Their project management team are second to none. If at any point things weren’t going to plan, they’d put in extra resource at no extra cost to us to ensure that the project stayed on track and was delivered successfully.” – Luigi Salzano, IT Project Director
Myhomemove now has a new virtual recovery environment hosted on Databarracks’ DRaaS platform.
“Disaster recovery elements are vital for our business continuity planning. In the event that we have an issue with our core data centres, we’re able to spin up our recovery environment in a matter of minutes. It’s built to be scalable, so we can go from having a limited amount of processing power when we’re just replicating our data to full-scale deployment if we need to switch all our conveyancing and other processes over.” – Paul Tennant
The Benefits Technology is only a part of Databarracks’ DRaaS offering. Working with a specialist disaster recovery provider has also equipped myhomemove with a better understanding of business continuity principles, and a greater visibility into their risk profile.
“Databarracks has made us more aware of what’s at stake if our vital systems go down. They have a particular understanding and awareness of the legal sector and the associated technology challenges. We’re not just better protected from a technology point of view, we’re also better informed. It’d be hard to cope without them in a disaster now.” – Phillip Alves, IT Service Delivery Manager
Databarracks also worked with the conveyancer to produce specialised business continuity documentation to improve their organisational resilience.
“Databarracks provided us with a comprehensive business-as-usual document which clearly articulated roles and responsibilities on both sides and delineates which services are in and out of scope. It’s an incredibly unambiguous way of consuming a 3rd party IT service, and it’s transforming into a living, breathing document for us that’s evolving as our requirements change.” – Luigi Salzano
The Solution
Initially myhomemove replaced its tape-based DR system with a DRaaS product designed to protect physical environments. However, when the IT department elected to virtualise much of the company’s physical infrastructure, the first DRaaS deployment was no longer suitable. myhomemove and Databarracks used the virtualisation project as a catalyst to find a compatible solution that offered more effective resilience.
The conveyancer required two things from any prospective provider: a depth of expertise around DR and business continuity, and a breadth of experience with different technologies to successfully deploy in a transitional environment.
“It was important to me to select a single provider of our business continuity services that would be able to change and grow with us.
