Executive summary
Challenge: Harvey Nichols is an international luxury lifestyle store, renowned both in the UK and internationally for the breadth and depth of its exclusive fashion merchandise. It is important to Harvey Nichols that customer satisfaction remains at its highest levels, and to do this they require the most reliable, secure and flexible network to support customer transactions and to store data.
Solution: Harvey Nichols chose Claranet to provide secure and reliable managed networking infrastructure and data centre services, via our PCI DSS compliant facilities.
Result: Their infrastructure upgrade provides a robust, secure yet flexible networking solution.
Network flexibility and security
Harvey Nichols originally engaged Claranet to provide managed connectivity, however they believed a move to a much bigger network provider was required as the volume of sites and data on the network increased. Soon after the move, Harvey Nichols experienced difficulties with its new supplier, so switched back to Claranet for an upgraded service.
Although we were very impressed with the networking solution Claranet provided us some five years ago, we made the mistake of thinking that when it came to a more complex networking solution, we would be better off with a bigger service provider.
What we found though was that the new network operator wasn’t able to maintain the same level of service that we had experienced with Claranet.
Infrastructure Manager, Harvey Nichols
The introduction of a new customer loyalty system and a new CRM system meant that having the most reliable, secure and flexible network to support customer transactions and to store data became crucial to business growth.
Network security is also important as it needs to protect customer data and secure card holder information as part of its PCI:DSS compliancy. Harvey Nichols also needs to preserve the intellectual property that this data represents.
Infrastructure upgrade for company growth
We were disappointed by our incumbent provider and looked for a company that could not only give us a similar solution, but also be highly responsive, flexible, and able to match our dedication to excellent customer service. Remembering the high level of service we had previously received from Claranet, we decided to get them back to manage our whole network infrastructure. We knew we would be in safe hands.
The service Harvey Nichols uses can be flexed and scaled over time to match business growth. The company currently has 11 sites, all of which are managed centrally as one group on the same MPLS service. Claranet will look after the Wide Area Network (WAN), which will include Local Area Networks (LANs), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and a virtualised testing environment.
Claranet has upgraded the existing infrastructure with additional bandwidth provided to support anticipated company growth. This is necessary as expansion will result in an exponential increase in data that the organisation needs to collect, manage and protect.
As Claranet’s data centres are PCI DSS compliant and allow customers to meet several sections of the security standard’s criteria, Harvey Nichols’ compliance burden is significantly reduced. Along with the reliability, security and flexibility of Claranet’s service, this has enabled Suddock and his team to focus time and resources on new projects and IT development.
Robust, secure yet flexible network
Claranet has been able to deliver a reliable, secure, flexible and robust networking solution that can readily scale to cope with Harvey Nichol's evolving bandwidth requirements. The built-in headroom of the current solution means that the retailer can utilise spare capacity to manage patching and maintenance more effectively and during timeframes that suit the business, rather than having to wait for quiet periods when demand is not so high.
We have significantly benefited from an improvement in the reports we can produce using the Claranet system. With Claranet we are now able to quickly and easily produce reports that provide an overview of system usage and any potential problem areas.
Harvey Nichols also appreciate Claranet's customer service.
In all of our interactions with the team at Claranet, we feel that we are an important customer, and that they have respect for the relationship. We know that, should we need it, we have access to the most senior executives in the business. This is invaluable to us. It’s important to have that level of commitment from an organisation when we are staking so much of our future success on this investment.