SME News Welsh Enterprise Awards 2023/ 18 Best Railway Systems Engineering & IT Support Company 2023 Operating in a very niche space certainly has its advantages, but it also comes with many obstacles and challenges. As the company gains notable recognition in the Welsh Enterprise Awards 2023, we speak to Lee Clough of IT-specialist, Pride Solutions Derby Ltd, about its work. Pride Solutions Derby Ltd (Pride Solutions) is primarily an IT & Technology partner to the railway. Starting life as a small IT business supporting small to medium sized enterprises and finding bespoke technological solutions to meet their unique problems, Pride Solutions was built on the back of a desperate need for honest, trusted, value for money support that was viable for small businesses – to allow them to capitalise on the wealth of benefits that come from well deployed and supported technology. The business grew on the back of this and migrated into the railway industry in late 2021 where it now provides IT, Engineering, and Cybersecurity support to various organisations, including passenger train operators, vehicle owning companies, and technical consultancies. Current workstreams for the business include supporting a large train operator to manage their ageing digital equipment, such as CCTV and data recorders, on 40-year-old passenger vehicles as well as providing consultancy support to that same operator around the cybersecurity of their new, state of the art fleets of trains. “We specialise in bringing together our wealth of railway engineering, IT system, and cybersecurity knowledge to provide support packages and assistance that is tailored specifically to meet the very niche needs of the customer in a highly regulated industry,” explains Lee Clough, the firm’s Director and he goes on to tells us more about the firm’s six core principles of Accountability, Safety, Pride, Innovation, Reliability, and Excellence, that underpin the organisation and everything it stands for.” Pride Solutions’ unique selling point is quite obvious – owing to its niche areas of specialism, namely the combination of railway engineering experience and technology skills, and this places Pride Solutions in an unusual position to provide extremely tailored support to very particular problems within the industry. What’s more, it also allows the company to turn solutions around extremely quickly, minimising disruption to the customer’s operation in a way larger organisations may struggle with. Working in the railway is an extremely challenging undertaking in itself and Pride Solutions is often bound by technical competency requirements, extensive legislation, industry group standards and countless stakeholders for every new project. Lee tells us that working with vehicles at a fleet level, it is also absolutely critical to ensure that solutions are as simple and repeatable as possible. Lee tells us, “Pride Solutions Derby Ltd has most recently worked extensively with Transport for Wales (TfW) to provide engineering support in their railway technical teams. We have extensively supported a fleet of trains in passenger service for approaching 18 months, ensuring a sustained improvement in performance and reliability to provide a high level of service for customers using the fleet. We have managed multiple deep technical investigations into persistent major defects, to ensure that TfW is given all the information required to make a cost effective, safe solution, maximising the return on taxpayers money.” The firm also utilises Cloud solutions and automation technologies to drive data led improvements to its systems. For example, writing scripts that are uses in its online systems to automate security testing of vehicles and fleets. This cuts down the amount of time required for data gathering stages and allows the company to get to the end solutions faster. To support this, Pride Solutions is also exploring how Artificial Intelligence can be used to further simplify its processes and add more value to the services it can offer its customers. Understandably delighted by this accolade, which is testament to the dedication and hard work put in by the team, Lee is now looking forward to a strong and prosperous future with plans to expand the firm’s cybersecurity capabilities beyond their current scope to include penetration testing, incident response, digital forensic evidence gathering and remote monitoring and detection capabilities. In fact, there is a roadmap laid out that sees the organisation qualifying in industry qualifications such as Certified Network Defender, Certified Ethical Hacker, Computer Hacking Forensic Investigation, and Incident Handlers to support customers at all stages of the cybersecurity lifecycle. Contact Details Contact: Lee Clough Company: Pride Solutions Derby Ltd Web Address: https://pridesolutions.co.uk
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