Thirteen Housing

About Thirteen Housing

Thirteen Housing is a social housing provider that provides homes and support for around 100,000 people across the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber. It manages more than 34,000 homes, and over 1,600 colleagues deliver its frontline housing, repairs and tenant services.

Thirteen does far more than provide housing. Alongside safe, well-maintained homes, it works to prevent homelessness, helps people into work, supports refugee resettlement, and provides extra care for older people, young people, care leavers and people with learning disabilities. As a Homes England Strategic Partner, it is also building hundreds of new affordable homes through a five-year programme running to 2029.

With so many people relying on its services every day, Thirteen needed infrastructure it could depend on, and the confidence that it would keep running whatever happened.

The Challenge: Business Continuity Risk in Social Housing

 A fragmented backup and recovery estate

Like many housing associations, Thirteen was running a mix of ageing systems across multiple platforms and suppliers. Each additional vendor added cost and complexity, and made it harder to be sure that disaster recovery would work when it was needed.

The impact on resilience and cost

The fragmented estate led to:

• Low confidence in business continuity arrangements
• Slow and unpredictable disaster recovery
• Data protection split across several vendors
• Rising storage and infrastructure costs
• Growing pressure on the internal IT team

When your services include supported housing and homelessness prevention, downtime is not an option.

The Solution: Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery from One Partner

One partner, one point of accountability

Synapse started with Thirteen’s estate as it existed. From there, we designed and built a single managed backup and disaster recovery service to replace the patchwork of suppliers, and we now manage it for Thirteen.

Designed around housing service priorities

The service provides:

• One managed service for backup and disaster recovery
• Near real-time recovery for critical housing systems
• Recovery objectives aligned to service priorities, so the most important systems come back first
• Less complexity and less day-to-day management effort
• Regular disaster recovery testing to maintain compliance and assurance

Continuously reviewed, built to adapt

We review the service continuously, so Thirteen’s cyber resilience keeps pace as the organisation grows and as its operational and regulatory needs change.

The Results: 160x Faster Disaster Recovery and 70% Lower Storage Costs

• 160x improvement in disaster recovery performance
• Approximately 45 seconds recovery point objective (RPO)
• 100% SLA achievement across the service
• 70% reduction in data storage costs
• Multiple legacy suppliers replaced with one integrated service

Thirteen’s team now spends its time on what it exists to do: building homes, supporting tenants and strengthening communities, instead of reacting to technology incidents.

What Thirteen Housing Says About Synapse

“Synapse was very responsive from the beginning. They proved the integration and recoverability in the POC. Everything was ‘no problem’, even when questions were outside the scope of the project. Very professional, with no additional invoices.”

Hassan Bahrani, Senior Network & Infrastructure Manager, Thirteen Housing

Why Cyber Resilience Matters for Housing Providers

Housing associations and social landlords are expanding their services while costs shift and compliance pressure builds. To support that, they need resilient infrastructure that can:

• Protect tenant and housing data
• Keep services running through cyber incidents and outages
• Support digital transformation and emerging AI priorities
• Reduce IT complexity and cost
• Meet regulatory and audit expectations

Synapse works with housing associations and social landlords across the UK. We design, build and manage the infrastructure they depend on, spanning data centres, private cloud, public cloud and data protection, and adapt it as their needs change.

Assess Your Disaster Recovery Readiness

Do you know how quickly your critical systems would come back?

Talk to Synapse about a recovery readiness assessment. We’ll start with your estate as it is, show you where the risk sits, and build a more resilient foundation from there.