The background
The Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA) is an executive agency of the Department for Transport and is the UK’s nationally approved authority for new road vehicles, agricultural tractors and off-road vehicles. Its vehicle certificates are recognised throughout the European Community and the wider group of countries belonging to the European Economic Area and the Geneva-based United Nations organisation (ECE).
The VCA’s head office is in Bristol with an office and test facilities in Nuneaton and another office near Milton Keynes. The VCA also has offices across the world in the US, Japan, Malaysia, China, India and Australia to satisfy the needs of vehicle manufacturers wherever they are based.
The challenge
The VCA needed a highly resilient network that would ensure that the data on its servers was always accessible to its staff. VCA also needed a highly resilient website so that its information was always available to the millions of customers that log onto it each year to seek testing and type approval certification for their vehicles.
Its network had previously been housed at a different data centre but the VCA had subsequently become unhappy with the level of service it had been receiving and was looking for an alternative.
The VCA was seeking a single solution that would include a re-designed network that would be more resilient. As one of South West Communications Group’s existing telecommunications customers, the VCA invited the Group to bid for the tender.
The solution
Following a formal tender process, South West Communications Group was chosen to design a new network and provide a fully managed service that included:
- Complete managed server network
- Load balancing
- Resilient Internet connectivity
- Pair of Cisco firewalls and switches
- Automatic data backup
- Ongoing support
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