“Triangle pulled out all the stops and the project was delivered on time. The initial capital investment will have paid for itself in 22 months. Staff can now focus on financial services and the company can become even more competitive.”
Aviva is Ireland’s leading composite insurer for life, pensions, general and health insurance products. However it had found itself with an aging IT infrastructure which needed modernising. The data centre sprawled over an area the size of half a football pitch and it was becoming expensive to maintain. There was a higher risk profile for production systems and the company was having more incidents where the effect of outages were significant to the business.
The data centre needed to become smarter; flexible, scalable and agile enough to adapt rapidly to the business needs, and to fulfil its potential affordably and efficiently.
The defined goals for the data centre project were set:
Triangle delivered a strategic, cost effective platform which allowed Aviva to reduce IT costs while improving service to its business units and policy holders. Aviva now has virtualised data centres which are delivering significant benefits for IT technology, service delivery and operations staff.
One of the key principles established early was that the project would build on Aviva’s own strengths and experienced staff in order to maintain skills and reduce risk. The project required the installation, configuration and migration of all existing systems and applications.
The key elements of this solution included:
Aviva benefitted in many ways as a result of this project. With their infrastructure transformed, Aviva is on a stronger growth path to take advantage of the general recovery in the Irish economy. Their data centre has become smarter, more flexible, scalable and agile enough to adapt rapidly to the business needs.
“There are many benefits with this project. The data centre, stability-wise, is ten times better than it was. Also, performance has improved dramatically, for example, we are able to run our month end processes on our systems locally and they completed in one hour. Prior to this project it took eight hours to complete.”
The IT Infrastructure teams in Aviva Ireland are now a key part of the global technical support services organisation, delivering services to Aviva businesses around the world. Half a million euro was saved in the first year with €800,000 in savings projected in the year that followed. Continued savings of this scale are expected thereafter. The initial capital investment will have paid for itself in 22 months.
The data centre was reduced to a quarter of its footprint. This has provided a significant reduction of 70% in data centre power and cooling. The savings in real estate in the centre of Dublin is an added bonus. Aviva can now repurpose three quarters of the floor space to generate rental income.
Data centre stability and performance has improved dramatically. There have been no incidents of the scale that previously occurred. IT is now in a position to react to the requirements of business units at the speed of changing markets and customer demands.
The disaster recovery processes are now more robust, reducing risk to the business. The preparation time for the twice annual DR test has gone from two weeks to a number of days, allowing valuable technical staff to focus on new IT projects.
