Freedom Leisure are the newly appointed operator for four leisure facility sites in and around Braintree. As part of the mobilisation and onboarding of these sites, Astaris have completed substantial remedial works to network infrastructure to ensure security, reliability and safety compliance.

As part of  a long standing relationship, Astaris are involved with the onboarding of additional locations for Freedom Leisure. The standardisation, compliance and security requirements often mean that extensive remediation works are required to bring the data & phone networks into compliance.

The needed work at four sites in & around Braintree was even more extensive than previous mobilisations due to the age of some of the locations and corresponding multiple layers of old & redundant technology that had not ever been decommissioned.

The complete strip back and rework of data cabinets revealed several previously unseen risks. These included multiple daisy-chaining of power extension leads, lack of PAT testing for some devices that were not easily reachable / visible, previous work of dubious quality standards and very outdated  / insecure kit being connected to the networks with no documentation or support.

Data cabinets have been transformed from being dirty tangled messes of cables and defunct kit, with little labelling or documentation to clean, secure, efficient, reliable, colour coded items that are able to correctly serve the business needs.

Ivan Spencer-Phillips, the Head Engineer at Astaris had this to say about the work

“It’s not just a case of making things neat and pretty. The removal of defunct kit that otherwise just sits there consuming power for no reason and would provide an easy route in for a cyber attack is crucial to ensure that unknown cyber risks are not ingested by the new site operator. The side benefit of markedly reducing wasted energy can make a difference of several hundred pounds per site per year. We also know from experience that redoing cabinets according to a colour coded and super neat schema prevents downtime, simplifies remote troubleshooting, increases overall security / network speed and should mean that emergency call outs to sites for network related issues are simply never needed.”