WhiteSpider working with FCA

Foster Care Associates

Foster Care Associates (FCA) is the UK’s largest independent fostering agency. With around 500 staff across the UK and further offices in 11 countries, FCA is committed to improving the lives of foster children and carers across the globe.

Reducing the administrative overhead

Management of FCA’s network had become inefficient and overly burdensome, with multiple resources required to manage an infrastructure spanning its head office, data centre and many branch offices. 

The majority of FCA’s IT budget was used up managing this sprawling network, while the IT team had insufficient time and resources to dedicate to fulfilling the overall goals of the organisations. What’s more, the FCA team still needed to call upon external support for specific technical requirements or to help troubleshoot any network issues meaning costs could be unpredictable.

Having previously worked with WhiteSpider on a series of data centre, WAN, campus LAN and WLAN projects, FCA turned to the company to provide a managed services solution to streamline its network management and free up internal resources for more strategic activities.

Making better use of IT resources

In 2017, WhiteSpider took over the day-to-day management of FCA’s UK LAN, WAN and data centre network infrastructure. Its managed service offering today provides FCA with the depth and breadth of skills and experience required to maximise the performance of its network infrastructure but with none of the headaches associated with managing it in-house. 

As part of the service, WhiteSpider is proactively monitoring the entire FCA network as well as offering hardware break/fix, fault and issue resolution and change management. WhiteSpider also provides break/fix services for FCA’s global network infrastructure, outside of the UK. 

Most importantly, FCA now makes better use of its IT resources with its team focused on IT strategy.