Forfusion Ltd

Managed IoT

With comprehensive monitoring, proactive maintenance, and expert support, a managed IoT infrastructure empowers your business to focus on core competencies while unlocking the full potential of a connected world. Managing sprawling IoT networks and security technologies can be readily embraced, ensuring you realise the transformative benefits of a managed solution.

Features

• Network device onboarding.
• Software image management (SWIM).
• Network assurance and visibility.
• Segmentation and compliance.
• Network policy.
• Visibility and reporting.
• Remote infrastructure management.
• Business continuity.
• Security compliance.
• ISO27001, TOGAF, ITIL, PRINCE2, and Cyber Essentials.

Benefits

• Realise exceptional customer experience.
• Maximise efficiency and productivity.
• Achieve secure connectivity and compliance.
• Meet sustainability plans and goals.
• Ensure effective financial control and management.
• Define robust standards on which solutions are developed.
• Facilitate service consumption models to maximise ROI.
• Showcase and trial technologies aligned with use cases.
• Undertake lifecycle services, delivered on time and in budget.
• Maximise availability and performance whilst improving security posture.

£650 to £1,750 a unit a day

• Education pricing available

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at steven.forrest@forfusion.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 14

Service ID

204567409146903

Contact

Steven Forrest
01915009100
steven.forrest@forfusion.com

Planning

• Planning service: Yes
• How the planning service works: The Forfusion Project Management Office is experienced in delivering cloud hosted solutions, and has adapted industry leading approaches to develop ADIOlogy, a best of breed methodology for assessing, designing, integrating, and operating cloud and hybrid environments. Our team of highly skilled and experienced consultants work with you to mitigate risks and enable cloud and hybrid digital transformation with a flexible and agile approach, applying knowledge, skills and tools to deliver the broad range of activities to meet the need of the project. We assess the range of solutions available to meet your business objectives and requirements, once these are agreed, we deliver your projects on time and to agreed budgets. A typical planning engagement will involve the following stages:; 1 - We will identify business outcomes and success criteria to develop requirements;; 2 - Develop and agree the project plan we will deliver against;; 3 - Produce dependency maps to ensure all requirements are fully met and to identify gaps;; 4 - Produce high and low-level design documentation to ensure the solution is fully understood;; 5 - Deliver the solution with regular checkpoints;; 6 - Complete Customer Satisfaction Tests to confirm all business outcomes and success criteria are met.
• Planning service works with specific services: No

Training

• Training service provided: Yes
• How the training service works: Vendor specific or bespoke to user requirements.
• Training is tied to specific services: No

Setup and migration

• Setup or migration service available: Yes
• How the setup or migration service works: Forfusion has significant experience in assisting organisations to transform and modernise their IT estate using cloud technologies. Migrating workloads to the cloud requires time and effort spent on up-front planning and risk mitigation and we know that moving digital assets and applications from on-premise or hybrid hosted servers to the cloud without appropriate planning poses significant strategic and technical challenges for an organisation. Forfusion will lead and support your organisation throughout the migration to the cloud using ADIOlogy, a best of breed methodology for assessing, designing, integrating, and operating cloud and hybrid environments. With a multitude of automated tools and software products attempting to solve the problem, enterprise migration planning is in high demand and even more critical to the success of any cloud adoption strategy. Forfusion’s cloud architecture teams understand the best-practices for migrating workloads, data, and applications from data centres and other hosted environments to a hybrid or cloud environment. This detailed understanding will help ensure a cost-effective, risk free and streamlined migration process.
• Setup or migration service is for specific cloud services: No

Quality assurance and performance testing

• Quality assurance and performance testing service: Yes
• How the quality assurance and performance testing works: Forfusion understands that service quality assurance and performance testing is foremost in any success criteria and is built into the service we offer from the initial communication. The Forfusion Quality team is responsible for ensuring that deliverables are reliable, meet business and technical requirements, and that adopted methodology is adhered to. To mitigate against the risk of an unsuccessful deployment, we ensure that business outcomes and success criteria are accurately captured within the earlier the planning stage and that quality processes are followed throughout the solution development and implementation. Forfusion addresses potential performance issues through comprehensive quality assurance using a combination of industry-standard, open source and in-house tools, frameworks and methodologies. Once completed, Forfusion’s QA service confirms: 1 - Functional Testing to ensure the solution meets the baseline requirements captured from the business outcomes; 2 - Load Testing to confirm the service operates effectively under load; 3 - Security Testing of all security requirements met, or that acceptable mitigations are in place.

Security testing

• Security services: Yes
• Security services type:
  • Security strategy
  • Security risk management
  • Security design
  • Cyber security consultancy
  • Security testing
  • Security incident management
  • Security audit services
• Certified security testers: No

Ongoing support

• Ongoing support service: Yes
• Types of service supported:
  • Buyer hosting or software
  • Hosting or software provided by your organisation
  • Hosting or software provided by a third-party organisation
• How the support service works: The Forfusion Managed Services, FusionCare, are a flexible, cost-effective way to ensure the availability and resilience of your IT systems and cloud services – we make light work of managing all aspects of your technology environment while freeing up your IT resources. We do this by providing you with consistent, dependable technology experts that follow ITIL processes and ISO standards. We help our customers mitigate risk, save money, manage complexity, and maximise business value from the functions they use. This is done from our UK based 24/7 Network Operations Centre which provides proactive monitoring, full IT service integration and MACD ownership, ensuring business continuity for our customers to compete more effectively. Highlights of our Forfusion Managed Services include:; ; 1 - Monitoring and alerting service 24x7x365; Service Desk (and NOC) providing a single point of contact responsible for the resolution of incidents;; 2 - Partner management to bring all your partners together under a single management umbrella;; 3 - Disaster recovery ensuring business continuity through pro-active backups of device and system configurations and user profiles.

Service scope

• Service constraints: No

User support

• Email or online ticketing support: Email or online ticketing
• Support response times: Dependant on SLA agreed, as little as 30 minutes.
• User can manage status and priority of support tickets: Yes
• Online ticketing support accessibility: WCAG 2.1 AA or EN 301 549
• Phone support: Yes
• Phone support availability: 24 hours, 7 days a week
• Web chat support: No
• Support levels: The Forfusion Managed Services, FusionCare, is a UK operated support function. Coverage can be tailored ranging from business hours up to 24x7x365 with response times as short as 30 minutes and options up to next business day.; ; Support costs will vary depending on the solution deployed and service levels/ hours requested. We offer fixed price support across all levels.; ; We can provide a Technical Account Manager and Cloud Support Engineer wrapped into all of our services.

Resellers

• Supplier type: Reseller providing extra features and support
• Organisation whose services are being resold: Cisco, Microsoft, Citrix, Azure, AWS, VMWare, Meraki, LoginVSI, Evolving Networks.

Staff security

• Staff security clearance: Conforms to BS7858:2019
• Government security clearance: Up to Developed Vetting (DV)

Standards and certifications

• ISO/IEC 27001 certification: Yes
• Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001: British Assessment Bureau
• ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date: 19/01/23 and renewed 23/01/24
• What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover: N/A
• ISO 28000:2007 certification: No
• CSA STAR certification: No
• PCI certification: No
• Cyber essentials: Yes
• Cyber essentials plus: No
• Other security certifications: Yes
• Any other security certifications: NCSC CISP

Social Value

• Social Value:

  Social Value

  • Fighting climate change
  • Covid-19 recovery
  • Tackling economic inequality
  • Equal opportunity
  • Wellbeing

  Fighting climate change

  To do our part in fighting climate change, Forfusion will where possible carry out work remotely, reducing the impact of travel on the environment. In October 2021 we implemented a formal Agile Working policy which provides our employees across the country the ability to choose to work from home or from the office as they see fit, only requiring them to work from site for team activities and other such situations. Whilst the reasons for this change were many, the environmental benefits were high on our agenda following consultation with our employees. In 2021, Forfusion began to actively discourage the provision of all petrol and diesel as company vehicles from next renewal. To encourage employees to make a greener choice, we have introduced a fully-managed and flexible salary sacrifice company vehicle scheme which only provides for 100% electric vehicle choices. Whilst many of our suppliers (of physical product) have fixed and remote distribution hubs that we have no influence over, we do make a very positive effort to choose suppliers of other services that are as close to our base as possible, minimising environmental impact when travel is necessary.

  Covid-19 recovery

  Our scope for impacting the management and recovery from Covid-19 is focussed on our staff across the UK, and we believe we’ve done as best we can to always go above and beyond in this area. Forfusion was concerned very early about the impact of the spread of the pandemic, sending all our staff to work from home some three weeks before the formal government advice. We were already a location-flexible working company and with than had the IT infrastructure in place to tell our staff not to come to the office until further notice. For essential office visits, we commissioned an approval-based booking system, drastically limiting office numbers to more than accommodate social distancing. For employees who either needed to shield, or had a member of their family shielding, we made amendments to their role or working patterns to best support their safety. While Forfusion, along with most businesses in the UK, made use of the Government furlough scheme, all furloughed employees’ wages were ‘topped up’ to 100% pay by Forfusion, to help alleviate financial worries of our staff during the pandemic. Forfusion increased and extended its existing mental health support for staff in anticipation of any issues caused directly or indirectly by Covid-19 as a precautionary measure. While we already had Sick Pay and Private Medical insurance benefits in place, we extended the scope of these benefits to include free mental health and wellbeing counselling sessions, free financial advice, free remote gym-at-home sessions coupled with flexible-working to enable sessions to be undertaken within the working day. As Covid-19 has receded, we have not asked our staff to return to the office. In October 2021 we introduced a formal Agile Working Policy, only requiring our staff to be in the office for specific team activities.

  Tackling economic inequality

  In 2021, we partnered with a local high school, Monkseaton High, to support them in their STEM curriculum. Year 10 students have been given the opportunity to learn about computer networks, connections and protocols first-hand. Where lockdown rules permitted and under strict social distancing guidelines, we have welcomed three groups of students into our offices for a day to experience the technology in person, engaging Forfusion staff from Apprentice to Senior Manager and Director level across the activities. We have invested and will continue to invest hundreds of hours into giving these young adults the best possible chance while actively trying to narrow the gender gap in our industry. We do what we can to create as many apprenticeship opportunities as possible, with previous engagements leading to full-time employment. We took one person on in June 2022, one in early 2023 and so far, another in 2024. We see our apprentices as long-term investments, and we have a retention rate of 100%, with all of them moving into full-time employment and progressing upwards in the organisation. We do what we can to create as many Apprenticeship opportunities as possible and have brought one each time the previous had progressed to full time employment, the most recently of which is planned for June 2022. We see our apprentices as long-term investments in them and by the business, and have a retention rate of 100%, with all moving into full-time employment and progressing upwards in the organisation.

  Equal opportunity

  Forfusion is a committed equal opportunity employer, and we operate an equal-opportunity approach to recruitment and in-work progression within our organisation. Two critical areas of Equal Opportunity that are of focus for us are gender imbalance and the gender pay gap. We are working hard to recruit and develop females in our traditionally male-dominated industry. Our female-to-male ratio continues to improve, whereby in May 2022, 80% of our female employees were promoted to manager or director level. We can still do more on female recruitment, with 98% of job applicants being male. We’re tackling this by engaging with the Newcastle United Foundation, which provides meaningful opportunities to improve the lives of thousands of children, teenagers, adults, families, and older generations. Our focus has been supporting the NUF with their Prince’s Trust Programme, which is aimed at teenagers and young adults who are out of education, training, or employment. We run taster sessions at our Newcastle office to introduce the young adults to the world of work and the IT industry specifically, then take a broad range of our staff and engage with them, in group and one-to-one sessions, to help them understand what following a career in IT might mean. We encourage the foundation to bring as many females to this as possible and are seeing over 50% take-up. In addition to the local community work, Forfusion sponsored the World Skills UK Equality, Diversity Inclusion awards early in 2022, and we continue looking for opportunities to do more of the same. We have a formal policy on Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking, which is made available to all staff and sponsored by our Business Services Director. A copy is available on request.

  Wellbeing

  We take the wellbeing of our staff, from a physical and mental angle, very seriously. We offer all employees free of charge comprehensive medical insurance (including mental health support) and mental health signposting through an expert external support organisation, and all employees are also offered gymnasium membership regardless of their geographic location. We have a long-standing quarterly employee review culture and educate our managers and leaders to encourage our team to talk about issues they have at these sessions or any other time. In 2020, Forfusion increased its existing mental health support for staff in anticipation of any problems caused directly or indirectly by Covid-19 as a precautionary measure. While we already had Sick Pay and Private Medical insurance benefits in place, we extended the scope of these benefits to include free mental health and wellbeing counselling sessions, free financial advice, free remote gym-at-home sessions coupled with flexible working to enable sessions to be undertaken within the working day. Our long-standing flexible working approach is largely designed to support our team's physical and mental strength. In October 2021, we implemented a formal Agile Working policy that allows all of our employees across the country to work from home or the office as they see fit, only requiring them to come in for specific team activities. In 2024, we are witnessing positive behaviours, whether performance related, or general wellbeing, stemming directly from implementing such policies.

Pricing

• Price: £650 to £1,750 a unit a day
• Discount for educational organisations: Yes

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at steven.forrest@forfusion.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.