Esteem Signs Healthy Compliance Contract With Four Seasons
Health Care
19th May 2005
Esteem Systems, one of the UK’s leading IT services providers, has been awarded a contract by Four Seasons Health Care to implement an e-mail and data archiving solution that will aid compliance with regulations such as the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act.
A key regulatory compliance policy for Acts such as Data Protection and Freedom of Information, is that information held by organisations needs to be secure, indexed, easy to retrieve and auditable throughout its life cycle. These requirements led Four Seasons, the UK’s largest owner and operator of care homes, to review its current levels of compliancy.
John Brogan, IT Manager of Four Seasons Health Care, explained: “It is becoming more and more common for Subject Access Requests to be issued by organisations and individuals in relation to issues such as data protection, discrimination and employment rights. This is just one of the reasons we decided to improve the effectiveness of our email and data archiving and this is, in part, why we are investing in this solution with Esteem.”
Under the contract Esteem will provide consultancy and implementation support services to Four Seasons in order to deliver an email and data archiving solution based on Veritas Enterprise Vault software, formerly KVS Enterprise Vault. The software will be installed on Four Seasons’ existing Microsoft infrastructure and will automate the email archiving process resulting in smaller local mailboxes.
The solution will address issues currently faced by Four Seasons with regards to the large size of filed emails and help speed up management processes such as server maintenance. Storage growth will also be easier to manage; the need to invest in additional storage will be removed and restore times will be reduced. The solution is also highly scaleable and will mean Four Seasons can store large volumes of data while still enabling employees to search and retrieve information easily.
Alastair Kitching, Director of Esteem said, ““Compliance laws and regulations are an increasingly important part of delivering IT infrastructures. Organisations that don’t have sound IT compliance strategies place themselves at unnecessary risk. Esteem works with organisations, such as Four Seasons, to mitigate those risks and deliver consistency, accuracy and efficiency to business processes for IT compliance.”
Four Seasons Health Care owns and operates over 440 care homes and several specialised care centres in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Isle of Man. Founded in the 1980s, the company is now one of the largest independent healthcare companies in the country. The company employs over 20,000 staff to deliver a range of services including care for the elderly, dedicated respite care, rehabilitation care, intermediate care and terminal care.
If you require any further information, please contact our Press Officer on 01937 861000 or e-mail on press@esteem.co.uk
