Castle Trust selects Adapt

Castle Trust, the mortgage and investment company with awards for innovation, has selected Adapt, the independent IT managed services provider, to host, support and secure its business-critical software. The agreement will see Adapt host the software on its award-winning enterprise Virtual Data Centre (eVDC) platform and provide built-in back-up and disaster recovery capabilities, while also applying rigorous security policies to meet industry regulations.

Launched in October 2012, Castle Trust is a new type of financial institution that provides a safer way to invest in the housing market or to buy a home. As the largest asset class in the UK, the housing market is worth over £4,000bn but has traditionally been inaccessible to investors, while homeowners are increasingly aware of the risks involved in buying their home. Castle Trust offers investments that provide returns based on the performance of the housing market, as well as Partnership Mortgages, a new type of shared equity mortgage for homeowners.

As a financial services company, security and data protection are critical considerations for Castle Trust. Following a thorough selection process, the organisation selected Adapt due to its highly secure, available and robust infrastructure that is fully compliant with FSA regulations and its roster of existing customer references, including Moneycorp and LCH.Clearnet. Adapt’s offering was further strengthened by the provision of physical hardware underpinning the eVDC. This layer provides additional security for Castle Trust’s software and allows the isolation of sensitive data, to ensure any information stored is subject to the highest possible levels of protection.

“We needed to be incredibly careful when choosing a service provider and, due to the nature of our business, we had to be 100 percent certain that the partner afforded the same level of security and protection to the data as we would have applied if we stored it internally,” said Tony Pauley, Managing Director at Castle Trust. “With Adapt’s eVDC we get complete assurance that strict security protocols are followed, both at the infrastructure layer and the data layer itself. As a start-up, hosting onsite was out of the question financially, but we wouldn’t consider a public cloud solution. With Adapt we get the best of both worlds, with the added benefit of a flexible solution that will scale with our business.”

The eVDC provides Castle Trust with synchronously replicated storage that transfers data in real time between two data centre sites, ensuring maximum availability and resilience. As with the data itself, each data centre facility is subject to stringent physical security processes, with multi-factor access controls, video surveillance and full audit trails.

“We are delighted that Castle Trust selected Adapt as a technology partner for such a sensitive and critical element of its business,” said Simon Fisk, Sales and Marketing Director at Adapt. “It is testament to Adapt’s dedication to providing a reliable and secure environment that an organisation performing rigorous due diligence has selected our eVDC to host its software. We are looking forward to further developing the partnership with Castle Trust as its business grows.”