Datapac - Disaster Recovery Solution and IT Infrastructure Upgrade for Campion Insurance Group

25 September 2009

A disaster recovery solution and IT infrastructure upgrade is implemented by Campion Insurance to keep pace with the company’s expansion, reduce business risk, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery.

The Campion Insurance Group was established in 1984 from a single office in Urlingford, Co. Kilkenny and has evolved to become one of Ireland’s most modern and innovative commercial and personal lines brokers with a staff of over 100 people and offices in eleven locations around the country.  Campion Insurance has implemented a disaster recovery solution and IT infrastructure upgrade in order to keep pace with the company’s expansion, reduce business risk, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery.

“We plan for continued growth and improved customer satisfaction and that increased the pressure to standardise and upgrade our operating platform and IT infrastructure”, explains Stephen Breen, IT Manager at Campion Insurance.  “We also wanted a disaster recovery solution to reduce business risk, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery”.

Datapac, Campion Insurances’ preferred IT partner was appointed to optimise the business and to provide consultation, installation, implementation, training and on-going support services.  Datapac implemented a solution that links all their offices through an Eircom BIP network via Cisco routers. This has allowed Campion’s  to centralise and publish all their critical business applications using Citrix from a central site to all their branch offices.  Campion Insurance can now distribute all services to any location as well as to their disaster recovery centre in Dublin. This structure has also allowed for ease of business growth and systems support. Due to Campion’s considerable expansion, Datapac implemented a new Windows Active Directory domain and MS Exchange services to cater for current and further expansion.  This has created an integrated and reliable platform that is more easily managed by Campion and increased efficiency for their customer services representatives.

"We needed a solution in place so that if some kind of interruption or disaster occurred, we could get back to work as quickly as possible.  In addition, we needed a robust infrastructure that would allow increased efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness by effectively connecting resources to business needs”.  Campion Insurance chose Datapac as solution provider after a competitive review. 

Datapac worked with the company to integrate its DR infrastructure into Campion’s data network by utilising the BIP Wide Area Network. Campion Insurance can now host virtual replicas of their live environment using technology from VMWare, HP, Microsoft and Citrix. This provides the infrastructure to allow online replication for Campions’ email, file servers and critical applications by mirroring them to a hot site location based in Dublin.   Datapac also implemented Double-Take which, each night, provides an incremental back up for the system state of the remaining servers and rebuilds an updated image of same in the hot site.

“We have centralised everything so from a management point of view it’s all in  one place with the security and anti-virus protection that we need ”, continues Stephen.  “We now have real time online replication with regard to our email and applications and this allows us to respond quickly in the event of any failure or disaster”.   The next phase for Campion Insurance is to link the phone systems into the bip network and introduce VoIP. 

“We can now move forward with confidence knowing that we have a solid IT infrastructure in place that is future-proof and can scale for growth”, concludes Stephen.  “It is also cost effective in the long-run, which means we can manage this system and deliver additional functionalities into the future". 

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