The Challenge

Solent Stevedores is an award winning Stevedoring company providing a broad range of bulk and general cargo handling and storage services at the Port of Southampton, the Port of St Helier, the Port of Immingham and Silvertown in London.  They also provide Cruise Vessel Support services to a number of prestigious cruise operators at the Port of Southampton.  The company has its headquarters in Dursley.

With an expanding business, it became more and more noticeable to the Directors that the IT infrastructure in place lacked resilience and presented a growing risk to the business.  With no overall strategic view of IT in place, a plan was needed to ensure that every aspect of the business, from weighbridge operations to general administration, had an efficient and effective underlying infrastructure.

GBE Converge were contracted to carry out an initial IT Audit which showed where potential issues lay.  Along with Solent Stevedores the team at GBE Converge looked at the current risks to the business and what actions were required to mitigate those risks.  This allowed both parties to know exactly what was needed to be done at each stage of the project.

The Solution

After carrying out the audit at Solent Stevedores, GBE Converge recommended the installation of a highly resilient server infrastructure.  This gives Solent Stevedores the confidence that if a single server fails then another one will take over instantly.  If one of the 5 sites were to go offline then the service will failover to another site within minutes.

This essential work has given Solent Stevedores a sound bedrock on which to build and expand their required software platforms.  Solent use IT proactively to serve their customers and they can now concentrate on the business rather than worry about data loss, data security and poor performance of their email systems.