Oil and gas industry

The client

A major UK fuel supplier owning import terminals and biodiesel manufacturing facilities across the UK. 

The challenge

The corporate mission is to be the fuel supplier with the lowest-cost, highest reliability and best systems and control. Having significantly expanded operations through a series of acquisitions and investments, the business was successfully positioned to take full advantage of underlying changes in the UK market and they needed to ensure their IT could fully support these objectives.

From a data centre perspective, their diverse IT infrastructure was located on premise and, partly as a result of the acquisitions, was split across a number of locations.

What happened?

An IT transformation project was put in place to deliver improved value from their IT investments. The scope was very broad, encompassing information security, business continuity and IT DR, business process controls and production IT systems.

They engaged a managed service provider to help them develop an appropriate and defined IT strategy, technology roadmap and data centre strategy. 

The rolling programme was designed to ensure IT and platforms were aligned to criticality of the business with ongoing investment to ensure both IT systems and facilities are at the leading edge.

Datum co-location

The production IT systems were to be hosted by a best-in-class third party data centre, supplemented by a secondary DR facility appropriate to the scale of the business and accredited to relevant standards.  

In the client’s words:

The company completed an application criticality assessment placing all mission and business critical systems with a MSP whilst choosing to place business important, operational and development environments into co-lo.

In the second half of 2014, the company elected to take seven racks within Datum FRN1 with cross-connects to their managed service provider. The secondary DR facility they selected was located just over 20 miles from the Farnborough site.