Woodlands Trust Case Study
Background
The Woodland Trust is the UK's leading charity dedicated solely to the protection of our native woodland heritage. Since 1972 it has grown to care for and protect over 1,000 sites covering 50,000 acres, including nationally and internationally important locations, as well as small urban and village woodlands. The Trust also protects over 110 sites of special scientific interest that include the UK's finest examples of wildlife habitats.
Based in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the trust has a workforce of around 240 employees, just over half of whom work in offices in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the rest working from home.
Overview
The Woodland Trust has a large network containing windows desktops, servers (running Microsoft Exchange, IIS and SQL), routers, switches, printers, firewalls and UPS. With its large population of home-based staff the Trust needed to be able to monitor network services, e-mail and data bottlenecks, as well as checking that various HR systems were running efficiently.
As a charity, the Trust could not justify the cost of typical enterprise software options. The team were looking for a value for money solution which was reliable, easy to set up, configure and run. Though there were several products on the market which provided the monitoring they required the team found them to be either too limited in scope, too complicated or too expensive.
After searching for around 18 months they were recommended to look at Mutiny. After a short initial demonstration of time monitoring of network interfaces, SMS fault alerts and device detection amongst other features the team identified Mutiny as the solution they needed.
Richard Otter, The Woodland Trust's IT network and systems manager said: It was all so simple. The Mutiny team gave us a web demonstration and we liked the appliance's functionality and simplicity straightaway.
Cost was an issue for us, as it is within any IT department, but Mutiny's pricing structure was simple to understand. The product was nowhere near as expensive as its other high profile rivals “ a big positive in terms of integrating it into our IT infrastructure.
Business Benefits
The installation and configuration of the Mutiny solution was quick and simple getting the team up and running in a single day.
Richard Otter said: It took half a day to install Mutiny and, with only an hour's training, we were up and running.
Mutiny constantly monitors The Woodland Trust's network traffic and hardware as well as the processes and applications that are running. At the initial set-up stage Mutiny was configured to understand the Trust's network infrastructure allowing it to foresee potential problems before they become more major issues. The Mutiny system cuts through the noise from the network and identifies the precise faults. The appliance is efficient and saves time, freeing up the team to be proactive in dealing with problems.
Richard Otter added: Mutiny gives the Woodland Trust IT team straightforward information, such as whether or not devices are actually connected. On a deeper level, it provides further data on processor usage, memory usage, and any problems with the disc drives.
Mutiny gives you a much better view of the bigger picture. For the first time I have a handle on how the whole IT infrastructure is working. That's across the whole of the network and the WAN. It's a great product, reliable, not expensive, and it's British “ it's nice to be able to say that too.
Future Benefits
As the Trust's IT infrastructure changes Mutiny will flex to its needs. Extra modules, tweaks and functionality are added constantly to ensure that customers are receiving security and peace of mind.
"With a wide network of devices in a large number of locations monitoring can be hard. By employing Mutiny the Trust has a robust, future proof solution. Mutiny allows them more visibility across their large network estate whilst allowing them to free up time for other tasks. Mutiny will continue to be on hand to support the Trust, and provide them with the ever evolving solution they need to accommodate the growing needs of their network. " Andy Murray - Mutiny's CTO.