Case Studies

Cloud Transformation for a London Housing Association

Property Services

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The Client

Our client is a registered housing association providing affordable housing and high-quality lifetime homes across London and the South East, with a particular specialism in independent living for people aged 55 and over. The association manages nine Independent Living schemes across West and North-West London and the Home Counties, alongside Extra Care accommodation, specialist homes for people with life-limiting conditions and physical disabilities, and general needs housing across multiple boroughs.

Many schemes are supported by on-site Local Service Managers, and communal lounges, laundries, gardens and activity rooms are central to daily life for residents. The association is a small organisation delivering a service that residents depend on every single day.

Our Role

Cloudscape acts as the association’s outsourced IT department and Virtual IT Director (vCIO). Our remit covers day-to-day service desk support, multi-site infrastructure, cyber security, and the technology roadmap presented to the Senior Management Team and Board.

In practice that means supporting a compact head-office team alongside frontline colleagues who work from scheme offices rather than desks at a single headquarters, a distribution that shaped every decision in this programme.

Challenges

  • Every document the association held, from tenancy files and repairs records to safety certificates, board papers and resident correspondence, living on a single on-premises file server in one central comms room, reached from schemes over a VPN
  • A single point of failure for every scheme: when the line, the server or the VPN client had a bad day, work stopped everywhere at once, and the people affected first were residents waiting on a repair, an allocation or a query
  • Wi-Fi that had grown organically over the years, with patchy and inconsistent coverage in large, thick-walled and in some cases historic buildings, leaving staff working away from where residents actually were
  • Frontline staff losing working time to slow file access and repeated VPN drop-outs
  • Special category resident data, including health, care needs, safeguarding and vulnerability markers, held in loosely controlled folders with inconsistent permissions
  • No sector-mandated cyber standard to work to, but a rising threat profile and a duty of care to vulnerable residents
  • A small team, unfamiliar with the cloud, needing to keep services running throughout the change
  • Growing transparency expectations under the Regulator of Social Housing’s consumer standards and access to information requirements

Solutions

  • Full migration to SharePoint Online, with a site architecture mapped to schemes, services and corporate functions, and the on-premises server decommissioned entirely
  • A site survey and managed Wi-Fi refresh at every scheme, with cloud-managed access points, separate staff, resident and building-systems networks, and central monitoring
  • Direct browser and mobile access to live documents, with Microsoft 365 apps deployed and managed through Intune and Autopilot enrolment for new devices
  • Microsoft Purview sensitivity labelling and data loss prevention, permissions rebuilt around role-based access, and retention aligned to the association’s own policies
  • An Enhanced Cyber package: MFA and Conditional Access, endpoint detection and response, 24/7 managed detection with SOC and SIEM oversight, email security and phishing simulation
  • Structured training delivered scheme by scheme alongside the migration, floor-walking support in the first weeks, and quick reference guides written around the association’s own document structure
  • A single, version-controlled and searchable document library with clear ownership, so governance, performance and safety information can be located and shared quickly

Business Impact

  • Removed the organisation’s reliance on an unreliable VPN solution, with core file services now delivering 99.9% availability.
  • Replaced fragmented legacy wireless coverage with monitored, business-grade Wi-Fi across every scheme site, improving connectivity and user experience.
  • Strengthened security by implementing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Conditional Access across the organisation.
  • Reduced the simulated phishing failure rate from 34% to 5%, significantly improving cyber security awareness and resilience.
  • Accelerated new starter device provisioning from two to three days to same-day deployment through the adoption of Microsoft Autopilot.
  • Established a more secure, reliable and modern workplace platform, supporting users with improved access, connectivity and operational efficiency.
Client testimonial

Don’t just take our word for it

“For years, everything we did depended on one room and one connection. If it went down, nine schemes went down with it. Cloudscape moved us to the cloud without a single day of lost service, sorted out the Wi-Fi at every scheme, and just as importantly trained our people properly while they did it. Our Local Service Managers now spend their time with residents instead of waiting for a file to open, and we have security in place that is well beyond what anyone would expect of an association our size.”

Senior Manager

London Housing Association

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