Building society begins million pound IT overhaul

The Kent Reliance Building Society (KRBS) is embarking on a million pound overhaul of its IT and network infrastructure.

The infrastructure refresh is aimed at allowing the KRBS to increase the size of its outsourced operations in India and the range of hosted network services it offers to third parties such as other building societies.

This is the biggest infrastructure project we have ever embarked upon and as a regulated financial institution we have to get it right first time.

The £1m contract for the IT overhaul has been won by network consulting and services company s2s, which will also provide managed network services for the next three years.

A new Cisco-based multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network at the heart of the IT refresh will enable all the KRBS' core business applications and processes to be operated and managed from a single data centre at the building society's headquarters in Chatham.

The KRBS will also implement a thin-client architecture across all its sites in the UK and India.

The new network and thin-client architecture will help the KRBS to set up new offices more quickly and cost effectively in locations that would have been uneconomic because of their size or remoteness.

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Steve Dockrell, head of IT at the KRBS, said in a statement: "This is the biggest infrastructure project we have ever embarked upon and as a regulated financial institution we have to get it right first time. Previous networks have been high maintenance and problematic but now we know that processes and data can be transported within the new network much more quickly and efficiently."

Other benefits the new network will bring include fully integrated voice over IP and videoconferencing services across the entire network.