The Kent Reliance Building Society has signed a £1m
contract with network specialist s2s to oversee a complete overhaul
of its IT and network infrastructure.
The deal will also see s2s provide managed services to maintain
the network over the next three years.
The infrastructure upgrade is aimed at speeding the growth of
Kent Reliance’s outsourced operations in India and increasing the
range of hosted network services it can offer to third parties,
including other building societies.
A new Cisco-based Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network
will enable the building society to run its core business
programmes from a purpose-built datacentre at its headquarters in
Chatham, Kent. Voice over IP and video conferencing will be fully
integrated across the network.
The new network is expected to be more robust and significantly
faster than the existing infrastructure, allowing Kent Reliance to
implement a thin-client architecture across its sites in the UK and
India.
The combination of the high-speed network and the use of
thin-client technology will make it “refreshingly simple” for the
building society to set up new offices quickly and cost
effectively, even in smaller or more remote locations, Steve
Dockrell, the building society’s head of IT, said.
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