Established in 1880, Provident Financial Ltd is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of personal credit products to the non-standard lending market. The company serves over 2.7 million customers through a network of over 400 branches, administration offices, call centres and websites.
Provident used the move of its Bradford head office as an opportunity to reassess its IT infrastructure and decided to relocate its data centre, which was previously onsite.
“The relationship we have with Node4 is one of the best ones we have with a third party.”
The company were looking for a provider that would help facilitate the move by providing a resilient data centre, secure enough to host all their vital data. It was also important that the data centre was within a close proximity to enable technicians to gain easy access.
Provident had a large server estate containing lots of dated equipment with a number of large enterprise class storage arrays and the data on there was crucial to the business. Provident had just one weekend to make the transition.
Node4 was selected as the data centre provider due to the ideal location of their Leeds data centre.
Provident were supplied with data centre space with an infrastructure spanning two sites, also providing a wide area network, connecting the two data centres resiliently whilst incorporating Provident’s head office. ‘Remote hands’ were included, meaning Node4’s technical team are able to carry out minor tasks, so frequent trips to the data centre aren’t necessary.
“Node4 are an extremely capable, flexible and agile company who are at all times happy to meet our needs. We put some non-standard requests to them & 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 & the confidence that we get from the Node4 team is exceptional.”
Andrew Clark, IT Transition Manager, Provident
