About us
About 4sl
4sl is a UK company based in central London. We focus on data custody and availability services for mid-size and enterprise firms in regulated sectors. Our clients include FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies with operations from North America to South East Asia.
For large, highly regulated organisations providing backup and data recovery services in-house can be a risky investment.
Our highly skilled team work with many well-known industry regulated global businesses to deliver complex, on-premise offerings as-a-service that make your life easier.
Work with us. We are confident that we will exceed your expectations.
The UK Team
Yousaf Khan
Service Delivery Lead
History
The founders originally met while working in IT in the financial services sector in the late 1990’s. In the mid-2000s, the consulting company we were working for was acquired by a large US vendor, and the seed was sown for starting out independently.
We set out to do something that other companies were not doing. We wanted to ensure that our clients got the levels of service the ease of doing business that we had always sought during our time on the ‘buy’ side.
Timeline
4sl was founded in 2007, when we started out as an IT infrastructure consultancy, primarily selling to large financial services clients.
In 2010 we won our first major managed services contract running global backup operations for a large oil and gas company. At this point, we started to explore how backup could be provided as a service.
2013 saw us win our first Backup as a Service contract for a top 30 law firm. We were also delighted to be listed in the Sunday Times Tech Track Top 100.
Another year of firsts, 2014 saw us win our first enterprise BaaS contract. In the same year, we also deployed our first AWS-integrated BaaS service.
2014 was also when we were re-listed in the Sunday Times Tech Track Top 100. Just as we reached 100 terabytes of backup data under management.
In 2015 we won a 5-year contract to manage the 13-petabyte storage estate of a leading UK retailer. We were also proud to be a Finalist at the UK IT Industry awards.
2017 saw us deploy our first Azure integration. We also reached 1 petabyte of backup data under management.
Today, our Backup service covers over 50 client datacentres and public cloud regions across the US, EMEA and Asia. We have over 2 petabytes of backup data under management.
Our Vision
Whilst 4sl has changed a great deal over the years, that principle has always remained. Our vision is founded on two concepts:
As a Service
For most firms, IT is not their core business. Public cloud and SaaS have demonstrated that consuming IT as a service can be far more desirable than managing in-house. We take that idea one step further to deliver complex, on-premise offerings as-a-service to make our clients’ lives easier.
Data Custody & Availability
As the traditional, vertical IT infrastructure stack is eroded by hyperconverged, public cloud, SaaS and microservices, we believe the future will be oriented around data.
Our Expertise
Our expertise is in storage and backup and whilst we are vendor agnostic, we work with all the leading technologies in both domains. We can help you make an informed choice that suits your specific requirements.
Supported storage technologies
We support: HPE, HDS, IBM, Netapp, Dell EMC and Pure.
Supported backup technologies
We support: Veritas, Commvault, DELL EMC, IBM, Micro Focus, Veem, Asigra and Arcserve.
Wider capabilities
We also have strong capabilities in platform and networks as well as public cloud technologies and techniques.
Expert team
Most of our staff come from an enterprise IT background and have worked in some of the largest and most complex environments in the world. We understand the issues.
Service management
The nature of enterprise managed services requires a thorough understanding of the IT lifecycle, and service management is one of our core capabilities.
Our expert Programme Management team oversee client onboarding and other major change/project activity.
Accreditations
Security of data is of paramount importance and we are accredited in both ISO 27001 (Information Security Management) and ISO 27018 (Protecting Personally Identifiable Information in the Public Cloud). We were one of the first companies in the UK to achieve ISO 27018.
We are also accredited in ISO 9001 (Quality Management System) which provides the framework for continuously monitoring and managing quality across our business, to deliver sustained high performance.
