About the customer

Selwood Housing is a social housing provider based in the Southwest of England, managing around 7,200 rental and shared ownership homes. For more than 30 years, the organisation has been committed to delivering reliable services to residents and supporting the communities it serves. With more than 330 employees living and working locally, Selwood Housing takes pride in its strong understanding of the region, its communities, and its customers.

The challenge

Selwood Housing was operating on a legacy MPLS network that no longer aligned with the organisation’s changing connectivity and security requirements. While MPLS had supported site-to-site communications for many years, it was less suited to a modern environment shaped by cloud adoption, hybrid working, and the need for stronger cyber resilience.

As working practices evolved and more applications moved to the cloud, the existing network model became increasingly difficult to scale and manage. Selwood Housing needed an approach that would simplify connectivity, improve protection for users and data, and support staff whether they were office-based, remote, or working in the field.

The main requirements included:

• Reducing the cost and complexity associated with maintaining a traditional MPLS environment.
• Strengthening cyber security across sites, remote users, and cloud applications.
• Providing secure, consistent access for employees working from home, in the office, and on the move.
• Supporting field-based teams who rely on mobile connectivity and cloud-first tools.
• Improving resilience through stronger backup and business continuity capabilities.
• Creating a scalable foundation for future digital transformation and service improvement.

“We’ve built a strong relationship with Wavenet and had excellent support throughout the project. The new solution keeps us secure, supports remote working, and gives us a scalable platform for the future.”

Perry Roche, IT Infrastructure & Operations Manager at Selwood Housing

The solution

After reviewing Selwood Housing’s network and operational requirements, we recommended a modern Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) strategy built around the Cato SASE Cloud Platform, alongside Wavenet’s Data Protection services. Together, these services were designed to modernise connectivity, strengthen cyber security, and provide dependable backup and business continuity support.

Cato SASE deployment: By moving to a cloud-native SASE platform, Selwood Housing gained a more agile and secure way to connect sites, users, devices, applications, and cloud environments. The platform brought networking and security capabilities together in a single managed service, helping the organisation simplify operations while improving visibility and control across the estate.

• Integrated security capabilities gave Selwood Housing a stronger security posture across its network, users, and applications. Key elements of the solution included:

• Universal Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to apply consistent access controls for users wherever they worked, ensuring access was based on identity, context, and least-privilege principles.
• Next-generation anti-malware and sandboxing to help protect against malicious files, ransomware, and more advanced threats.
• DNS security to block requests to known malicious destinations and reduce exposure to web-based threats.
• Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) to detect and prevent exploit activity and other suspicious behaviour before it could impact the organisation.

With centralised visibility and intelligent threat detection, Selwood Housing’s IT team was better positioned to monitor activity, respond to issues quickly, and maintain strong security without adding unnecessary operational overhead.

Cato Networks DEM (Digital Experience Monitoring): Cato DEM gave Selwood Housing clearer visibility into the user experience of SaaS and cloud applications. It helped the team identify whether issues were caused by the application, the network, or connectivity conditions, with drill-down metrics for specific apps. Synthetic probes also simulated user activity to detect potential issues before they affected users.

• Modernised connectivity improved performance and delivered secure access across offices, remote workers, and cloud services.
• Greater agility and scalability allowed the organisation to adapt more easily to changing business needs, new services, and future growth.
• Wavenet Data Protection services added backup and business continuity capabilities to help safeguard critical systems and data.

• Secure backup services to protect critical business data.
• Replication capabilities to support recovery in the event of disruption.
• Improved resilience and continuity planning for essential services.
• Ongoing support from Wavenet to help maintain performance and protection.

“It was also important for us to make sure our field-based teams felt secure when using their mobiles out and about, particularly as they rely on cloud applications every day. This solution gives them that confidence, while helping us maintain strong security across the organisation.”

Perry Roche, IT Infrastructure & Operations Manager at Selwood Housing

The results

• The combined deployment of Cato SASE, Cato DEM, and Wavenet Data Protection delivered a range of benefits for Selwood Housing, including:

  • Improved operational efficiency: a simpler, more unified approach to networking and security supported day-to-day service delivery.
  • Stronger cyber resilience: better protection for users, applications, and data across the organisation.
  • Scalable infrastructure: a platform ready to support future change, growth, and digital initiatives.
  • Enhanced business continuity: backup and replication services helped protect critical data and support recovery planning.
  • Better visibility and control: improved monitoring across users, applications, and network conditions made it easier to identify the source of issues and resolve them more quickly.
  • Improved application experience: deeper insight into SaaS and cloud application performance helped Selwood Housing take a more proactive approach to troubleshooting and optimise the digital experience for end users.
  • A cost-effective alternative to legacy networking: helping Selwood Housing move away from the limitations of MPLS while supporting long-term value.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could help your business with the areas covered in this case study, then get in touch at enquiries@wavenet.co.uk.