Griffiths & Armour

Customer overview

As a leading independent insurance broker and risk management consultants our client, Griffiths & Armour, have over 80 years’ experience in delivering bespoke risk solutions to customers of all sizes, across various industries, all around the world.

With a strong customer-centric culture that is underpinned by an in-house team of 180 highly qualified employees, focused on the tailored delivery of solutions to protect businesses and help them find the right cover for their needs.

Customer challenge

Following an acquisition, our client’s incumbent IT infrastructure partner made significant changes to their customer offering, meaning the level of support and consultative relationship previously enjoyed was affected. As a result, their aim was to work with a technology partner who could offer support and guidance and our client began the process of speaking to alternative providers.

As an existing supplier of connectivity services to Griffiths & Armour, M247 were invited to meet their IT team and discuss a wider portfolio of products and services that would consolidate both data and infrastructure and match the consultative led approach that was part of our client’s culture and way of working.

Upon initial conversations, several immediate challenges were highlighted as areas where IT support was sought, and where M247 could offer help and guidance.

The client needed to better consolidate data and the infrastructure supporting it across sites and environments, whilst improving the resilience of all IT operations. This meant that a thorough approach to cloud and hosting, with a particular attention to backup and disaster recovery, were key to the wider business transformation journey.

The legacy design of our client’s infrastructure meant that the business was managing two different sites, one for infrastructure and the other for disaster recovery.

Not only was this an expensive setup with a costly secondary site, but capacity issues ensued when our client out-grew their infrastructure, so had to spin up software at the secondary location. This resulted in significant impact on business operations, compromising IT resilience and budgets.

Furthermore, the legacy set up was also impacting on the overall data management across sites and environments and subsequently on the disaster recovery protection in place. The client needed to better understand what could be stored and where; and how they could transform their data into an asset rather than a liability by having the right strategic approach to cloud and infrastructure.

Other known issues were related to the performance, licences, and software of their data centres, adding up to the list of challenges that the business was facing.

With all the above adding up and costing the business more time, money and risk, the IT function was unable to meet the business expectations and operational requirements.

Customer goal

Griffiths & Armour were seeking a strategic partner who would help them make cost savings whilst enhancing their newly developed IT strategy. They wanted a partner who could guide them through the right decisions that benefit the business on key operational areas, such as cost, service, and technology consolidation. They wanted a technology partner who would work with them in consultation capacity, to achieve the best results for the business.

Our solution

Taking a phased approach, M247 helped devise an approach that enabled our client to decommission their secondary site. The equipment was relocated to a new primary site, which was operating their mission critical infrastructure, offering security and a significant cost saving.

Running concurrently, and to address our client’s concerns about business continuity and resilience, we set up 247Cloud™ on top of their existing infrastructure, enabling us to deliver a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution which further strengthened our client’s IT resilience.

This approach helped strengthen continuity and consolidate the infrastructure for more efficient data management. Using 247Cloud™ as an all-in-one backup platform allowed for a more rapid backup, with a flexible, scalable solution to the fragmented service and setup.

Once implemented, we deployed Backup as a Service (BUaaS) and kept commercials at the forefront of the service offering, knowing that the escalation of costs was a key concern for our client.

Our client had a strategy to follow best practise data retention guidelines and therefore store 3 copies of data for security and resilience. Using Griffiths & Armours network and attaching physical hardware we were able to extend the value and life of a pre-existing purchase and leverage existing investments by utilising this as the vehicle for the 3rd data backup. This significant cost saving came at a time when the renewal costs of the incumbent backup provider far exceeded budget available.

Acknowledging the importance of both data back up and disaster recovery solutions, M247 proposed the running two lots of licensing within the datacentres as an op-ex model; enabling costs to be significantly reduced and protection to be substantially increased.

The timeframe to delivery of these solutions was just 3 months. Our team delivered a comprehensive technical solution whilst always offering advise around best practice guidelines, tailoring the solutions specifically to the needs and challenges of our client and undertaking a commercially sensitive approach. The combined aim of M247 and our client was to work in partnership to drive change in the IT infrastructure.

Results and benefits

M247 were able to help shape our client’s IT strategy. Working in partnership, both teams worked collectively to address issues and consider the best possible fit, both technically and economically. M247 now provide Griffiths & Armour with services such as cloud and hosted colocation, data backup as a service and disaster recovery.

By offering a consultative approach to IT and data strategy, we have managed to:

• Offer a viable and significant cost saving alternative to backup and disaster recovery
• Tighten data management and backup systems to ensure efficient data recovery, availability and pre-empt data loss
• Significantly reduce our client’s IT expenditure, at a time when cost savings were critical
• Become an end-to-end technical advisor and partner supplying cloud, data backup and colocation services for improved business continuity