Lincs and Notts Air Ambulance

Lincs and Notts Air Ambulance Charity Trust is one of the UK’s leading Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS) Charities. At a time when every second counts, the arrival of the iconic yellow helicopter really can mean the difference between life and death. LNAACT transport the equivalent of an A&E department to people suffering from the most serious of illnesses and devastating injuries, providing the best possible treatment as quickly as possible. The organisation demands the very best and we extend this approach to our selection of suppliers.

Ridings Managed Technologies have worked with the charity for three years and provide fully managed IT, VoIP telephony and managed print services to the organisation.

LNAACT currently have 3 main sites, together with numerous shop locations. Ridings provide support to all locations which includes unlimited helpdesk support. For any issues we are unable to resolve remotely we provide on-site support delivered within strict SLAs.

Ridings replaced the ageing server infrastructure at LNAACT which comprised on separate independent physical servers which were out of warranty and end of life. This presented a business risk and potential cause of downtime should any hardware fail.

Ridings implemented a virtualised server infrastructure based on Microsoft Hyper-V technology. This provides a flexible, scalable and robust platform which removes the single points of failure and can adapt to suit the future needs of the charity.

During the last 36 months we have also carried out a email migration for the charity from on-premise Exchange to Office 365. This migration has provided additional benefits including cloud collaboration and share cloud storage.

Ridings also provide connectivity to the seven charity shop locations. We deliver FTTC connections to provide a link back to the headquarters in Lincoln allowing each shop to have access to the new management system.

This allows us to provide a full end to end solution allowing us to proactively manage every aspect of the LNAACT network and minimise downtime.

• Virtualised server infrastructure
• Site to site connectivity
• Managed Anti-Virus
• Patch management
• Minimal single points of failure

Ridings also provide managed cloud backup for the on-premise server estate which provides an automated nightly backup into the AWS public cloud as well as synchronising a copy to local SpeedVault storage. This ensures data is stored in three places and in a disaster recovery situation allows us to recover the servers to either the same hardware, dissimilar hardware or to a virtual machine in the cloud.

The backup agents use True Delta technology which work at the block level, allowing them to transmit changes only rather than the full file.

Ridings’s helpdesk team proactively monitor the backup agents and routinely perform test restores. Nothing is left to chance.

Ridings are proud to be chosen as a key partner to LNAACT and deliver best of breed services to maximise uptime and reliability to this critical infrastructure.

We position ourselves as an outsourced IT Manager holding quarterly meetings to review network performance, future plans and an IT strategy for the next three years.

• Proactive network management
• Connectivity to all sites
• 24×7 monitoring
• Unlimited helpdesk and on-site support
• Cloud backup strategy