Provident Financial, the UK’s leading provider of personal credit products, used the move of its Bradford headquarters as an opportunity to reassess its IT infrastructure and decided to relocate its data centre, which was formerly on site. The new deal, which builds on their previous relationship with data centre provider Node4, will allow Provident Financial to keep control of their equipment but have peace of mind that it will be housed in a suitable purpose built environment.
Provident Financial issued a tender to find a company that would help facilitate its move by providing it with a data centre that would be secure enough to host all of its vital data. At the same time, it was also important that this data centre would be within a close enough proximity to enable the technicians to gain easy access. As a result of this, Node4’s data centre in Wakefield was an ideal location for Provident Financial’s service.
Node4 supplied Provident Financial with data centre space with an infrastructure spanning two separate sites. It also provided a wide area network that connects the two data centres together resiliently, and also incorporates the Provident Financial head office. Within the service, Node4 also included ‘remote hands’ where its technical team can carry out minor jobs on Provident Financial’s behalf so frequent trips to the data centre aren’t necessary.
Andrew Clark, IT Transition Manager at Provident Financial, said, “Our original head office had a data centre in it that had grown organically. It wasn’t a purpose-built environment as such and there were a number of issues that arose as a result. We looked at building our own data centre within our new head office but there were a number of constraints such as space, power and cost. Being a data centre provider or builder isn’t our core competence. That’s what led us to go out and do an ITT to have a look at the market and ultimately we decided to work with Node4 for the project.
“The remote hands facility in particular gives us confidence. We can rest assured that the Node4 team know our environment and are more than capable to action our requests when needed and do the job as an equivalent to one of our IT staff when smaller tasks need performing.”
At its old data centre, Provident Financial had a large server estate which had a lot of dated equipment. There was a number of large enterprise class storage arrays, and the data on there was key to our business. Despite this, Provident Financial had just one weekend to make the transition. They were confident, however, that they would be moving their data to be housed with a provider that understood their needs.
“Node4 are an extremely capable, flexible and agile company who are at all times happy to meet our needs”, says Andrew Clark. “We put some non-standard requests to them, and they go out of their way to help us in any way, shape or form. The relationship we have with Node4 is one of the best ones we have with a third party. The service that we get, the sort of value-add, and the confidence that we get from the Node4 team is exceptional.”
