Radius Payment Solutions is a global business services company headquartered in Crewe, Cheshire, which operates in 18 countries across 5 continents employing over 2000 people. They have a wide range of products including Fuel and Telematics for the Fleet and Transport sectors through to Telecoms and Insurance solutions needed by nearly every type of company.
What do they have?
In 2020 Radius Payment Solutions came to Advatek to refresh their Fortinet Fortigate firewall estate and to look at optimising the network at their head office in Crewe.
“Fortinet has been our preferred firewall vendor for over a decade now. We liked the fact that Advatek have a strong relationship and good reputation with Fortinet “ Tim Browning, Radius Payment Solutions.
At the start of the firewall project, Radius and Advatek worked together on configuring all of the new firewalls ahead of installation.
“We had two options, either migrate the old config or start from scratch. We took the decision to do the latter because although it was more time consuming, we felt it presented the opportunity to carry out a full review of our firewall configuration and ruleset which would result in a more optimal configuration,” Tim Browning, IT Operations Director, Radius Payment Solutions.
Build a strong collaborative working relationship
Advatek and Radius have a unique collaborative working relationship – with the Radius IT team working closely with the Advatek technical team, drawing on their specialist networking and security expertise.
“As a business, we have gone through some fairly significant growth in the last few years. It’s important that we ensure that our wide area network (WAN) evolves and grows with the business. However, we were also keen that we took that step back and ensured we had the foundations of our network configured optimally.”
Tim Browning, Radius Payment Solutions.
“It's good to have that strategic partnership with Advatek, built on a strong relationship, so we can finalise the design and come up with an implementation plan that works within the culture of Radius.
We like to be self-sufficient; we have a large IT team. Sometimes, it can be challenging to work with technology partners on a consultancy basis due to our strong preference for collaborative approaches and we try to discuss this openly when we're embarking on a new project.
But with Advatek we've been very pleased with this open collaborative approach right from the start. They ensure that we upskill if necessary and during any implementation, appropriate knowledge transfer takes place to our team.
There are some great technical skillsets within Advatek and we have been able to lean on that and draw from it. It helps to have that second set of eyes and to bounce ideas off each other,”
Customers are the lifeblood of the Advatek business, and they work hard to develop and build strong working relationships. Through a mix of internal training and strong recruitment, Advatek has an exceptional IT technical team with a Cisco CCIE and Fortinet NSE 7 qualified engineers.
“I think we've built a great relationship with the technical team. They have a really good approach, a real can-do attitude. There is some really knowledgeable and intelligent staff, definitely a huge asset to the Advatek business,”
I feel we've got a good balance, so we're happy with the approach. And like I said, it's that real collaborative way of working, which we really appreciate, “ Tim Browning, Radius Payment Solutions.
