Saffron Insurance Services

Saffron Insurance Services, head office in Saffron Walden, Essex, has over sixty years’ experience in the field and eleven sites. It is one of the largest Insurance Service providers in East Anglia.

Expansion of operations over the years meant that Saffron’s IT infrastructure had become more and more complex and difficult to manage. Essentially each time the company required additional applications or data storage, new servers had been added. Not only had Saffron paid for the additional physical space, but valuable management time had been wasted.

In addition, software licenses had been purchased on an ad-hoc basis and it became increasingly time-consuming to ensure they were kept up-to-date/correctly licensed/that licenses were kept up-to date.

Solution

As existing hardware began to age, the decision was made to move to a new model, replacing the old one with three virtual hosts and implementing a SAN for data storage and backups. After lengthy discussions with Network Technologies, Hewlett Packard was selected as the preferred vendor so the hardware solution was built around HP ProLiant Gen9 servers and an MSA 2040 SAN.

Saffron enrolled in two Microsoft agreements, ensuring correct licensing under programs that were cost-effective, flexible and easy to manage in the future. At the same time, they also embraced Office365, rolling this out company-wide.

We worked with Network Technologies to consolidate our Microsoft licensing compliance and virtualised our entire server real-estate. Throughout the process Donald, our account manager, was communicative and consistent with the many configuration changes and quote refinements. Where we have experienced product or licensing issues, Network Technologies have always addressed any concern promptly