Insurance player Campion invests in private cloud rollout

23 Mar 2013

Pictured: John Casey, Sales Director, Trilogy Technology, John McCarthy, Chief Finance Officer, Campion Insurance and Edel Creely, Managing Director, Trilogy Technology

Campion Insurance Group has invested in a virtualised private cloud rollout with ICT provider Trilogy Technologies to modernise its IT systems with a cloud system that joins up its 100-strong workforce across 10 locations in Ireland and the UK.

The company needed to modernise its IT systems and opted for the private cloud.

The core infrastructure upgrade included the implementation of a Virtual Server environment, Active Directory and Citrix upgrades as well as moving from an on premise Microsoft Exchange environment to a  cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 email service. 

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are facilitated by the implementation of the Veeam suite of products providing a replicated platform to a secondary location for the production environment and critical systems.

“We always considered ourselves to be the most technologically advanced brokerage in Ireland – with the latest technologies deployed around server infrastructure, unified communications, a private managed network and various other leading edge solution sets,” Campion’s chief financial officer John McCarthy explained.

“However, we had continuous problems with our IT systems and platform. Having acquired a number of businesses over the years – and the IT systems that came with them – attempts to centralise operations had been fraught with problems.” 

The main broker platform suffered from time lag and a blame game ensued as the software company blamed the IT platform and the communications company blamed everyone else. 

Transactional business

“We are a very transactional business, where your’re trying to give quotes and plans to people who don’t want to wait,” McCarthy explained. 

“The IT was completely distracting us and it was not providing the support we needed to run our businesses.”

Trilogy Technologies, Campion Insurances’ ICT services provider implemented a fully redundant virtual private cloud infrastructure which when configured was moved offsite to a data centre.

The complete solution is underpinned by an outsourced Trilogy Managed Service contract for a fixed monthly fee which includes a fully outsourced helpdesk, the on-going administration and management of the infrastructure with added application and system monitoring all of which is reported via the Trilogy edge/point portal.

“We can now increase our capacity and remove roadblocks.  The alternative was a major upgrade across all our sites so it has saved us a lot of money,” McCarthy said. 

“The migration went smoothly, and there was an immediate and consistent improvement in the performance of its software.”

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com