Customer Story
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Smarter Communications for Global Health Research -
Powered by Zoom and CloudClevr
Background
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is one of the world’s leading public health universities, ranked #2 globally and #1 in the UK. A key player in the UK’s response to COVID-19 and the Ebola outbreak, LSHTM is known for its cutting-edge research in infectious and tropical diseases.
With sites in London, Uganda, and The Gambia, LSHTM focuses on research and postgraduate education to create a healthier, sustainable, and equitable world.
We spoke to Jaspal Dhalley, Network Manager at LSHTM, about how the university is evolving its unified communications strategy — and why they chose to partner with CloudClevr and Zoom to make it happen.
Challenge
“It’s a constant live environment. The systems can’t be switched off due to 24/7 analysis”, says Jaspal.
LSHTM had been a long-time Mitel user, but this traditional telephony setup was starting to show its limits. With physical handsets to manage, mounting maintenance costs, and little flexibility for remote and hybrid working, the experience didn’t match the global, modern demands of their workforce. LSHTM needed to:- Enable anywhere, anytime access to comms solutions, securely.
- Simplify telephony maintenance and management.
- Migrate to a modern voice set-up with minimal research disruption
- Support hybrid working while reducing hardware costs.
Solution
Working closely with LSHTM, CloudClevr developed a hybrid model that overlays Zoom on top of the existing Mitel infrastructure.
“We didn’t want a rip-and-replace. We wanted flexibility, and CloudClevr understood that.”
Already using Zoom for room bookings, the team considered both Microsoft Teams and Zoom as their unified comms platforms. The decision came down to ease of rollout, licensing costs and inclusions, ease of adoption for employees and students, and minimal disruption.
Storage was another critical factor. With continuous research generating large volumes of sensitive data, LSHTM was paying extra for secure cloud storage. CloudClevr’s inclusion of unlimited storage included in the Zoom licensing, removed that barrier, making it easier (and more cost effective) to store and access research data at scale.
“We visited Zoom HQ. We didn’t just want a demo – we wanted to know how other organisations had implemented it, what problems they faced, and how it’s performing now. That gave us confidence.”
“CloudClevr already knew our estate – that was important to me, especially as someone fairly new to the organisation. They could fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.”
Key features in the proposed strategy included:- Phased out-of-hours migrations – To avoid interrupting critical research environments.
- Proof-of-concept testing – Giving teams the space to learn, test, and adapt before going live.
- User empowerment – to enable users to personalise settings such as speed dials, without relying on central IT.
“Whether it’s empowering users or ensuring business continuity, this isn’t just a tech project, it’s a smarter way to support our research,” says Jaspal.
Outcomes Expected
- Zero downtime for live research environments.
- Global access to a unified comms platform.
- Less maintenance overhead for the IT team.
- Flexible, future-ready infrastructure to support evolving research needs.
- Better user experience with less technical dependency.
- Lower total cost of ownership through storage consolidation and fewer physical devices.
“We needed a solution that keeps pace with our research, without getting in the way of it.”
Why CloudClevr?
When asked what three words he would use to describe the LSHTM relationship with CloudClevr, Jaspal said: