Staffordshire based housing association, Aspire Housing has partnered with leading cloud and digital service provider ANS, to lay the foundations for their impressive digital strategy.

Aspire Housing, which helps to support thousands of customers across Staffordshire and Cheshire has joined forces with ANS to provide an end-to-end managed infrastructure service which has seen the housing association leverage managed cloud and WAN services.

The housing association has adopted a cloud first strategy across its group, which also incorporates PM Training; Staffordshire’s largest provider of apprenticeships for 16-18 year olds. The strategy will see most applications delivered through SaaS, giving employees the flexibility to work out in the field, helping to provide more hands-on support for their customers.

The Azure cloud platform will also enable the organisation to unlock data, allowing them to create more useful and accurate insights which will provide an end-to-end view of their customers. This will allow them to take a more pro-active approach to customer wellbeing, property maintenance issues and learner progression as they continue to grow.

Grant Sharman, group head of IT at Aspire Housing commented, “Ultimately our goal is not only to provide homes and education for our customers but also to provide support to help them live more stable, happy and healthy lives and to help create better futures. To do this more effectively we need to be able to build a better social picture of our customers. By moving to Azure, we can leverage the latest tools and technologies to better understand what issues our customers are facing and what changes are happening across the entire social environment.

ANS’ expertise in the housing sector has really helped us to understand the art of the possible and we look forward to continuing to work with them as we maximise our managed infrastructure investment and push forward on our digital strategy.”

Joe Wolski CTO at ANS, added: “Social housing providers across the country are now beginning to recognise the need to lay solid foundations on which to innovate and embrace emerging technologies to improve the lives of their customers. Aspire Housing are in a really strong position to improve services for their staff and customers alike and we look forward to continuing to support their IT team as they maximise their cloud and connectivity investment.”