Endsleigh Insurance Services Limited: insurers ensure that they’ll never lose access to their data

Endsleigh Insurance Services Limited needed a secure and reliable way to backup its customer data, and a surefire disaster recovery strategy to keep it operating. By connecting Endsleigh’s two data centres in Cheltenham and Burnley over a 1Gbit/s, point-to-point connection, Virgin Media Business has created a ‘super highway’ capable of moving huge amounts of data between sites at lightning speeds. Now the data centres are constantly in-sync with each other, so should one site go down, the information is instantly accessible at the other. Virgin Media Business is also providing a 500Mbit/s virtual private network (VPN), giving Endsleigh’s employees high-speed connections to applications and IP Voice to enable smarter ways of working as well as reducing costs.

With its online business booming, Endsleigh Insurance needed to find a new way of managing, storing and backing up huge amounts of customer and transactional data. Endsleigh knew its two data centres needed to synchronise information continuously and securely, so that its data was readily available should either centre fail. Endsleigh also wanted to increase capacity for its internet services, anticipating a large increase in online transactions. Virgin Media Business gave Endsleigh the tools to manage its data transfer effectively and boost the service for employees.

With the trend for online purchasing on the up, Endsleigh has seen online sales of its insurance products leap sharply over the past two years, resulting in a huge surge in the amount of data the company needs to store and manage. What’s more, because the majority of the data contains confidential customer information, such as address, vehicle and medical history, it’s crucial for Endsleigh’s customers to have complete assurance that their data is totally secure.

Endsleigh’s two data centres are just over 210 kilometres apart – if either was to go down for whatever reason, Endsleigh needed to ensure that it didn’t lose access to its data. Virgin Media Business worked with Endsleigh to deliver a point-topoint solution linking both data centres, ensuring that data can be transported around the organisation at speed – giving the business a watertight disaster recovery solution.

“Over the past two years, we’ve seen a large amount of growth in the online side of our business. More customers want to buy and manage their insurance services online and we knew that our existing network infrastructure was not up to the job. We started planning to up our network capacity and High Capacity Services from Virgin Media Business suited our needs perfectly. We’re now able to send enormous amounts of data to and from both data centres, and back to our head office - safe in the knowledge that if one goes down, our data is backed up and available. Now that our data centres are in-sync with each other, we can get on with providing more innovative online services and growing that side of the business in line with customer demand,” explained Graham Denne, IT Services & Infrastructure Manager for Endsleigh.

By installing a 1Gbit/s point-to-point service, Endsleigh’s network capacity is now 10 times larger than before. With more bandwidth to go around, the business has capacity to meet current demands, and has more than enough room to grow as their online customer base increases.

Graham adds, “It’s good to know that we’re fully prepared for whatever the future might hold. With more than enough bandwidth, we have the confidence boost to embrace the anticipated growth in the online side of our business. We can look to maximise our growth potential whilst being fully assured that our business and customer data is totally secure and backed up at two locations.”

To help ease Endsleigh’s day-to-day operations, Virgin Media Business also installed a 500Mbit/s Ethernet VPN to supercharge their customer service. The offices now have a single, high bandwidth connection for voice and data traffic. This network is the perfect vehicle for handling calls – the nonjitter and low latency connection ensures they are of the best quality. With all services running over one resilient network, the business has reduced costs and given staff more flexible ways of working – the catalyst to create more innovative services for their customers.

The new network connection is a simple, flexible and costeffective solution for Endsleigh. Up to 10 times less expensive than a traditional Wide Area Network, it helps Endsleigh to keep costs under control, while easily managing the inevitable growth in data as its business grows and hires more staff.

“We chose Virgin Media Business as our network technology partner for a number of reasons, but the main one is that they took the time to really understand our business. The solutions we were offered were well priced and the results have exceeded our expectations. The people we’ve worked with have made a real difference too, offering continuous support throughout the install, we’d certainly work with them again,” Graham concluded.