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BIS managed colocation services help Catlin double size of London office
“BIS has been key to supporting Catlin during a period of significant growth. They met all our data centre requirements and it has been a pleasure to work with the BIS team throughout.”Simon Johnson, Group IT Service Manager, Catlin Group Ltd.
Catlin Group Limited is a leading global speciality property and casualty insurer and reinsurer. The business was established at Lloyd’s of London in 1984 and now has over 1,600 staff working from 52 offices globally. As of 31 December 2009, the firm has total assets of more than US $11.5 billion.
Catlin has grown significantly, both through acquisitions and organically. In 2006 the Catlin London office almost doubled in size by acquiring Wellington Underwriting plc, and in the process became the owner of the largest syndicate at Llo yd’s. Its global expansion continued in 2007 and
2008 with 12 more international offices added to its network, and in 2010 it acquired Angel Underwriting Strategic Holdings in the UK.
Catlin has taken a leadership role in research regarding the potential impact of climate change. The Catlin Arctic Survey is a major, multi-year scientific effort to gain a better understanding of changes to the Earth's environment. In order to support the significant amount of international expansion and reflect the needs and
efficiency of local offices, Catlin’s IT department has needed to be extremely agile.
The Catlin IT team has faced some tough challenges over the past five years: a rapidly expanding firm; the infrastructure integration associated with the Wellington acquisition; connection of multiple international locations and support for a growing workforce of users worldwide.
Simon Johnson, Group IT Services Manager at Catlin, realised that an external data centre partner was needed to provide the required resilience and flexibility. With very specific requirements for both its primary and disaster recovery sites, Catlin imposed strict physical limitations on the distance between the data centres to ensure that they could support the company’s clustered services.
“We needed to find a data centre partner flexible enough to support our growth with operational support in central London. We also demanded stringent SLA’s at an appropriate cost level.”Simon Johnson, Group IT Services Manager, Catlin Group Ltd.
Catlin needed to find a cost-effective data centre provider with room to expand in central London for the company’s 150 servers and 68 racks. Catlin also needed a partner to provide it with the highest levels of resilience, security and connectivity. The firm used a consultancy to help define and implement its data centre strategy through a robust tendering process. Following this process, BIS was appointed as Catlin’s primary and secondary data centre partner.
Having won the tender against competition from much larger global managed services organisations and data centre operators, BIS embarked on a project to host Catlin’s Group IT primary services within BIS’ London data centre. Services hosted include production hardware underpinning Catlin’s core operating systems, underwriting platforms and collaboration systems including Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. This environment is hosted by BIS who support Catlin’s global operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
‘We were concerned that our requirements might be too onerous and that BIS would not be able to meet them. However we were impressed. BIS was able to provide two high quality central London colocation sites that met our requirements”Simon Johnson, Group IT services Manager, Catlin Group Ltd.
BIS also worked with Catlin to provide a secondary backup site in London. Most of Catlin’s IT services are clustered and mirrored so that following a failure in the primary data centre, services will automatically fail over to the second site. BIS also provides Catlin’s London inter-site links as part of the company’s contingency and
disaster plan. BIS’s ability to provide reliability and resilience whilst supporting Catlin’s growth has given Catlin the confidence to ask BIS to help plan and support network changes including the imminent relocation of 800 people to new London headquarters.
BIS has continuously adapted to Catlin’s expansion by delivering high quality, flexible and cost effective colocation space throughout five years of working together. Catlin has saved time and money and improved service availability by not having to host services itself. This is a key factor in Catlin’s recent decision to renew its contract as well as widen the services it takes. BIS has been able to manage contract negotiations with other suppliers as part of its value-added service and provides a single central point of contact for all issues and queries. BIS also conducts a monthly service review with Catlin’s IT management providing up-to-date information on incident monitoring, news, open calls and access reporting.
“BIS’ monthly reviews are invaluable in reporting back to the business and auditors. BIS has maintained excellent service throughout out growth and they get things done in a timely manner.”Paul Abadesso. Data Centre Manager, Catlin Group
BIS is a significant part of Catlin’s IT delivery and currently provides most of Catlin Group’s Global data centre services from London. BIS is a key strategic IT partner to Catlin both now and for the long-term future.
Catlin Case Study