Parkdean Resorts

The situation

Parkdean Resorts operates the UK’s largest portfolio of holiday parks. Thousands of guests arrive each season expecting consistent service: catering systems that work, booking confirmations that come through, housekeeping rotas that are accurate, payment processing that doesn’t fail. That experience depends on IT systems running reliably across multiple data centres.

The company was facing a dual challenge. They needed to consolidate five data centres into one. At the same time, they were closing offices in the south of England and moving operations north. These weren’t sequential projects. They were happening simultaneously. Mark Grimes, Chief Information Officer, summed up the constraints: “There was little time, little money, and we needed a quick success.” He added: “We needed to condense our data centres and this was all on the back of closing our offices in the south of England and moving them to the north.”

The risk was substantial. Consolidating data centres requires meticulous planning. Applications have dependencies. Data needs to migrate cleanly. You can’t simply turn off old systems and switch to new ones, guests can’t be left without booking confirmations or payment processing. Doing this while relocating the teams running those systems meant there was no room for extended downtime or planning delays.

What SCC did

SCC approached this as a sequenced migration rather than a switchover. The key was understanding which applications could move first, which dependencies needed to be replicated, and which needed special handling. A booking system can’t fail. A guest arriving for a holiday expects to find their reservation exactly as they left it.

SCC worked backwards from the consolidation deadline. They mapped every application running across the five data centres. They identified which ones could run on the new consolidated infrastructure without modification. Which ones needed updates? Which would require data synchronisation during the cutover? They built a migration schedule that moved systems in a logical order: non-critical systems first to validate the process, then progressively more critical ones.

The physical relocation of the operations team added complexity. As staff moved north and offices in the south closed, the team managing the migration was itself in motion. SCC built flexibility into the project plan. They ensured that the cutover activities could be managed remotely, with teams in their new locations. They validated procedures ahead of time so that when the actual migrations happened, no one was learning a new system in the midst of a live changeover.

What changed

Parkdean moved from five data centre locations to one. That meant lower infrastructure costs, simplified operations and a clearer picture of system dependencies. The company also gained agility. With a single consolidated environment, it became easier to test new applications or update existing ones without worrying about compatibility across multiple data centre configurations.

The business continuity profile improved. With five data centres, if one failed, applications had to failover in an ad-hoc way. With one consolidated centre, the company could implement proper disaster recovery and backup procedures. The holiday parks could operate with greater confidence that booking systems and payments would be available.

What the client learned

Parkdean learned that complex migrations work when you have a partner who respects constraints. They had little time and little money. Rather than ignore those constraints and propose expensive solutions, SCC designed the migration to work within them. The learning was about sequencing: breaking a seemingly impossible task into smaller, manageable steps that each have a clear success criterion. Mark Grimes’ requirement for “a quick success” wasn’t met with an optimistic timeline. It was met with a realistic one that delivered wins early and built confidence as the project progressed.