NHS Nottingham Customer Story

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust successfully implemented Cryoserver after a thorough and rigorous evaluation. Cryoserver delivered ease of use, fantastic search speeds and gave the Trust a route to migrate away from a legacy solution which had performance and support issues. The Trust were able to protect and secure the large volumes of sensitive data, and significantly reduce costs with just one email archiving project.

Email Archiving Problems & Solutions

1. Managing the Trust’s legacy archive had become expensive in resources, time and money

The legacy solution used 9 servers and had started wasting IT’s time. “Our legacy solution was always a bit clunky, in that we had to search many [archives] because it had slowed down. We tried to restore to the HR person who had requested the emails and it wouldn’t always work, it was just a lot of faffing around.”

Cryoserver provides the Trust with the ability to store and search all the emails and data they previously had, but only requires 2 servers. The transition has been smooth with users adopting Cryoserver quickly: “An impact on the helpdesk would ring alarm bells, but I’m not seeing that with Cryoserver.“

“On the previous product, we’d do the search in the product and have your notes on a separate screen for all the searches you did – but Cryoserver does all that for you.” With Cryoserver the Trust pay lower annual costs as well as taking advantage of a better, faster email archiving solution.

2. The team’s legacy archive was slow to perform searches and to use

“We had to search multiple archives because the legacy product had slowed down so much. The way it displayed the results wasn’t good and once you got all the results out, restoring them didn’t always work.”

Cryoserver has been a breath of fresh air for the team. Going forward David Westwood (Infrastructure Manager) is confident Cryoserver will support his team perfectly: “We tend to do searches for our HR department and it’s important that its accurate and not too time consuming for IT. Cryoserver comes back with the relevant information quickly so you’re very confident to send that to the HR department.”

3. Introducing new technology in a large organisation can be disruptive

The organisation had to be sure of real benefits and intuitive use.

In order to ensure new IT products are fit for purpose the Trust use a rigorous testing process. They were pleased to see the results from Cryoserver: “We had to have high standards in place when it came to security and testing because we were rolling this out to 15,000-odd people. We needed to be really confident  that we weren’t going to get lots of helpdesk calls as soon as we released it, and the documentation that we were going to have to do for it wasn’t going to be too laborious. So that was very important to us, and has worked very well. We selected a few of our heavier users for testing. They all came back and said Cryoserver worked really fast.”

4. The Legacy product’s support was unresponsive and slow

“With the previous email archive, the support eventually got to the root of the cause, but it was time-consuming for us.”

The experts at Cryoserver operate out of offices in both London and Toronto, to make sure there’s always someone ready to help. During the implementation of Cryoserver the Trust could always speak to a fully-trained technician with years of experience. “Implementation-wise, the people who’ve done it have been very good. It’s just a quick phone call to get up to speed, and they just follow it through and make sure that Cryoserver’s up and running.”

With Cryoserver installed, David and his team are able to perform searches faster than ever before. Not only that but they have a team of experts on the line to help with any and all queries during the import of their legacy data. Moving forward the Cryoserver system will save the team time on all email searches thanks to the ease of use crafted by the team of experts over Cryoserver’s 18+ years of development.