Combat Stress improves mental health care for military veterans with Dell infrastructure revamp

'They really just blew all the other people at the table out the water,' Combat Stess CIO Richard Burley tells Computing

Combat Stress is the UK's leading charity for British military veterans' mental health, supporting over 5,600 ex-service men and women who have fought in conflicts ranging from World War II to the more recent operations in the Middle East.

The charity spends over £15m a year providing free specialist treatment and welfare support to conflict veterans and operates a 24-hour helpline for former soldiers and their families.

Spread across three geographically diverse sites, the organisation has centres in Surrey, Shropshire and Ayrshire. However, until recently, that infrastructure was of an "appalling" nature, as Richard Burley, CIO of Combat Stress explained.

"When I arrived in 2012, Hollybush House in Ayr was connected to the other sites by an ADSL line which, with all the best efforts of our previous suppliers, was providing an appalling level of functionality, stability, uptime and value for money," he told Computing.

Burley went on to describe how the network connection for the site, which supports 60 staff and 30 veterans, was "a sore point for the users". Analysis of connection speeds showed they were working with "considerably worse latency and considerably less bandwidth on average than a 3G connection on a mobile phone".

"I was absolutely amazed that the staff there had continued to use the systems and follow the protocols because the patience required from them was astronomic," said Burley.

"We had such a problem of communication between sites that we were probably running at half efficiency for staff."

Therefore, on arriving in the role of chief information officer at Combat Stress in September 2012, Burley described how his brief was "to take things to an industry leading security capability across all of our virtual and physical interfaces".

"With that in mind, and with what I think is potentially a familiar story to people in growing SMEs, I started thinking about who we could bring in to most rapidly transform that into a best practice environment," he said.

Burley described how he was familiar with Dell, having used the vendor's hardware at Combat Stress and in previous roles, but was unsure whether the cost of Dell products would be suitable for what is essentially quite a small, but far-reaching, charitable organisation.

"I've used Dell for a long time for servers and laptops, but I have to be very honest and say initially I wasn't really aware of their capability around professional services," he said, adding that he believed such offerings would be too expensive for Combat Stress to deploy.

"And while I was aware that they did provide that, there was an image in my mind that it would involve £500,000 of consulting to support us through a whole series of technical projects."

Nonetheless, Burley explained how he decided to approach Dell about the networking project, due to mutual familiarity between the vendor and the mental health charity.

"I thought let's have a chat, because they were already supplying laptops and servers to Combat Stress," said Burley, who added the thought that Dell would be one of the potential partners "who get cut because they're too expensive for an SME".

But, due to Dell's experience with projects in the health service and the military - thus demonstrating the firm could handle sensitive data about Combat Stress patients - the firm quickly found a place on the shortlist of potential solution providers.

"As we had discussions with potential partners it became clear that [Dell] had much synergy with the things we did, because they had teams dealing with top level military IT projects, really top level NHS infrastructure projects," he said.

"They literally had the whole stack, you can buy a hard disk from Dell and as evidenced by Combat Stress, you can buy a multi-site network solution and not only have the equipment in house to provide all of those, they have the expertise to configure it."

Dell's readiness to listen and provide exactly what was required played a role in selection.

"There was a willingness to listen to what we wanted, not be prescriptive and say ‘this is how you should be doing networking.' They were fully engaged with us. So we had substantial investment of people time from Dell to support," he said.

"Secondly they weren't prescriptive on which projects we needed to do, they were very open to understanding what our priorities were, what the needs of the veterans and the staff who support them were."

The support offered by Dell meant "they really just blew all the other people at the table out the water in terms of feeling interested", said Burley, who went on to describe how he "felt that they were taking us seriously and not as if we were going to get one of their interns because they had other big projects elsewhere".

"We really felt appreciated and understood and valued by Dell and that was hugely significant, because in the past I've had firms trying to sell me their solution without understanding my needs," he added.

Burley said Dell's approach was "refreshing" and supported the core objectives of Combat Stress, "because we need to get that exactly right so it perfectly matches the needs of the veterans and the staff that support them", he said, adding it also represented "very good value for money".

Naturally, Combat Stress did look at other options aside from Dell, especially smaller, more local vendors, but found that the networking solutions on offer just couldn't match up with the charity's needs.

"I was initially hoping we could procure each solution from the local area to keep the service miles down and support the local communities," Burley told Computing.

"But it quickly became clear that the sorts of providers of that size and distribution couldn't support the service across the UK, but most importantly, they just didn't have anywhere near the level of expertise that Dell had. I'm really confident that we're getting a platinum solution but have also scaled down cost wise."

As a result, Dell has provided Combat Stress with a networking roadmap which has improved the charity's IT operations and when completed will provide around £60,000 in savings per year.

"We are replacing every single piece of networking equipment from the firewall to the backbone switches to the layer three switches which support all of the sockets in the sites. We're stripping out all of the sites, that's in excess of 60 serious bits of networking infrastructure and that's going in. We're looking to complete that at the end of January," said Burley.

The project means eventually all of the Combat Stress network will be operated by Dell, something which Burley told Computing means the charity has a far more resilient infrastructure that it did previously.

We will have a single vendor for all of our network stack, from the perimeter to the desk, across all our systems, voice, data and so on, so it couldn't be more comprehensive an infrastructure. It's literally the entire infrastructure of Combat Stress," he said, before going onto praise Dell's attitude to working with his organisation.

"We talk a lot in IT about partnerships around supplier relationships, but most of our relationships are really still a client supplier relationship, but with Dell I do really think it's a partnership."

And Combat Stress has ultimately reaped the rewards of that partnership, with its IT infrastructure in a much better position than it was in 2012.

"Combat Stress would be far worse off today if Dell weren't providing substantial expertise that they've gained from much larger organisations to us," Burley concluded.