G4S Technology streamlines internal business communications with Star

27 July 2010

G4S Technology provides fully integrated building security systems throughout the world, protecting everything from small offices and schools to large multi-national organisations and high security Government facilities. Providing integrated security solutions that need to be available 24/7, G4S Technology must be confident that all systems are 100% available, resilient and robust.

As part of an IT review, G4S Technology began to look at ways of streamlining internal business communications in order to benefit from better efficiencies.

Simon Haynes, IT Manager at G4S Technology, is tasked with the challenge of connecting all the different office branches and ensuring they have access to the same resources with a robust and resilient network.

Simon explains: “As a business with both a national and international network, we wanted to find a partner with resilient and robust networking solutions so that all of our applications can be available 24/7, wherever our employees are based. Having the experience of being a Star customer for eight years we knew that they have the customer-focused services we were looking for and could be trusted to manage the required connectivity for us.”

Star provides G4S Technology with fixed, dedicated bandwidth, which ensures that the business has critical services on site, such as applications, e-commerce or Voice over IP. With the fixed monthly fees, Simon knows exactly how much they will be spending each month, and is able to quickly and easily increase or decrease the requirements in alignment with the needs of the business.

The key component of this offering is the ability to add new sites and remote workers to the network quickly and easily due to the simple roll-out process. “For us, we need the ability to flex up or down the number of sites and users on the network as and when required. Our core business systems are based out of Gloucester, and now employees across the globe have the same access to vital business services as those in our head office. All our business systems depend on Star to keep them available and resilient at all times,” says Simon.

Star is also hosting a central IP phone system, which has improved scalability and manageability. This has reduced G4S Technology’s expenditure as they now only have one phone exchange for the whole company, instead of having the cost burden of a number of different ones for different locations.

Finding the right connectivity and hosting partner was vital, but it was also imperative that G4S Technology found a technology partner whose services were compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). PayChannel, a G4S Technology brand, is a provider of credit and debit card, ATM, BACS and Contactless transaction processing systems. Managing customers’ card and personal details requires PayChannel to be subjected to regular and rigorous testing to make sure that they are able to provide the level of security required; this includes ensuring that they remain PCI DSS compliant.

PCI DSS is a security standard that includes measures for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture and software design. The aim of this standard is to show that the correct measures are in place to protect customer account data.

Simon continues: “For us, the need to be PCI DSS compliant is vital if we wish to continue to operate as a payment service provider. We have a range of customers, including some of the UK’s leading airports, so we needed to be very stringent in our network security. This standard was something that we were not able to meet or maintain on our own without help, and is subjected to testing at all times. For this reason we opted to work with Star whose services help us to meet the requirements and means we can focus on our business objectives.”

The process of achieving compliance can take around 18 months and, as a part of the requirements, G4S Technology had to implement appropriate control measures to restrict access to the cardholder data. As this data is hosted in Star’s UK data centres, Star undertook a security audit, which demonstrated that they had the measures in place, both physical and electronic, to meet the stringent requirements needed by G4S Technology.

Following the PCI DSS audit at the data centre, Star was granted PCI DSS compliance regarding access control measures. Simon points out: “When Star was granted the compliance we were able to inherit that requirement from them as we were able to show that our managed services provider was compliant. Star provides the secure physical environment and physical network points of presence and we responsible for the systems, network configurations and data management. We are now able to offer a complete end-to-end solution; something we would not have been able to achieve without Star’s help.”

Simon concludes: “Star has been a key part of our team for eight years and I anticipate they will continue to be in the future. We have not experienced any issues with their service and they have proven to add real value to our company. We have continued to grow as a business and have a fantastic working relationship because I know that I can trust them with my data. Our long term goals include further expansion, and together I know we can do this easily and cost effectively.”

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