Selwood Housing Group partners with ANS for cloud support and enterprise cyber security.

Selwood Housing is delighted to partner with ANS, Microsoft UK Services Partner of the Year 2024, to transition its remaining private cloud infrastructure to Azure, favouring a cloud-first operating model with streamlined operations, simplified management, and industry-standard 24/7/365 security from ANS’s Managed Detection & Response (MDR) service to protect against the growing cyber threat in social housing.

Like many social housing providers, Selwood Housing has faced both the cost-of-living crisis and shrinking budgets, while also continuing to support its customers across a portfolio of over 7,000 properties in line with Selwood Housing’s corporate vision – providing secure, safe and affordable homes while improving and reinvesting into the local community.

To add further pressure, like many associations, Selwood Housing is aware of the ever-growing threat of cyber criminals, hackers and ransomware, having seen the devastating impact of cyber-attacks on other public sector organisations, including housing associations, that have faced damages in the region of tens of millions of pounds, with major impact to key services.

This presented Selwood Housing with an acute challenge – to continue to improve, modernise and transform services, while also streamlining and cutting costs. By migrating to Azure, Selwood will streamline multiple IT environments into one, reducing its overall hosting and support costs, providing a platform for future adoption of advanced cloud services and making a substantial contribution to the association’s carbon reduction objectives.

This has enabled Selwood Housing to free up budget for enterprise-grade cyber security, adopting Azure Sentinel and Microsoft Defender with 24/7/365 monitoring and threat detection from ANS’s Secure Operations Centre in Manchester, ensuring Selwood Housing’s customer data is secure and that its key services have the highest level of protection from bad actors.

Mark Mayler, Group Finance Director at Selwood Housing Group commented “This project marks a significant milestone for the progression of Selwood Housing’s technology strategy, achieving a number of our key objectives and laying the foundations for future cloud development. It is also enabling us to reduce overall IT spend and use these savings for further investment in our customers’ homes. ANS’s expertise and impartial advice throughout this process has been a real help. I would recommend any housing association to have a conversation with the ANS team if they are looking to do something similar.”