Bennetts is the United Kingdom's number one provider of bike insurance and insures more than 240,000 motorcyclists in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Established in 1930, Bennetts has more than 85 years’ experience in the insurance industry. In 2000, Bennetts was the first motorcycle insurance specialist to launch its quote and buy facility online.
The move to the cloud comes after Bennett’s recent acquisition by Saga plc, which led Bennetts to seize the opportunity to modernise and improve its legacy systems. Bennetts had a wish-list for its new solution:
- An immediate move off its current IT infrastructure, with a committed timescale from the outset
- A robust disaster recovery solution
- An upgraded software and hardware plant as much of it was end of life. In the process of moving, Bennetts also wished to fully virtualise its legacy hardware
- This all needed to happen without disruption to its day-to-day insurance business
Bennetts had an existing relationship with Datapipe and through reputation, Bennetts realised that Datapipe had the capability to take on this kind of challenge and invited them to tender for the project.
Datapipe committed to delivering the new infrastructure within the timescale required. Most importantly, it could fulfil all of Saga’s requirements for a robust and secure environment, providing 100% uptime throughout.
With guidance, Bennetts decided upon a secure and multi-tenant environment within Datapipe’s own dedicated private cloud environment, with upgraded infrastructure and the capability to scale.
In four months, the entire production e-commerce platform – including both the application stack and web stack – was moved onto Datapipe’s private cloud solution. This included key parts of the business such as its business-critical aggregator service, call centre application, quoting engine, and pricing applications.
However, the work did not stop there. After the move onto Datapipe’s private cloud solution, Datapipe spent the next six months building out a redundant solution that provided Bennetts with an active-active resilient server pair located across two data centres. This means that if one data centre goes offline for whatever reason, an intelligent load balancer will automatically redirect traffic to the second data centre.
Jeff Weston, IT Director at Bennetts, says “Datapipe did an exemplary job. Not only did the team deliver in the short timeframe given, they continued to work to improve our infrastructure. We now have an upgraded, resilient solution that is monitored 24x7 and running on our private cloud. We are confident the infrastructure we have in place can support the business as it grows.”
Scotty Morgan, Chief Sales Officer, Europe at Datapipe, says “With Bennetts we broke the mould. It was the fastest time to contract that we’ve delivered. We had a secure private cloud solution ready to go and it was a great fit for Bennetts. From start to finish, the whole process to supply new upgraded infrastructure and migrate its data and applications took just four months.”
