Martin Brokers Saves £63,000 Per Annum

The Business Critical Requirements Text Box: Scott Martin, IT Manager of Martin Brokers, stated: "oncore IT has implemented a commercially viable online backup service with enough proven resilience to assure my managers that all IT systems would be immediately available if a disaster was to strike I am convinced by the bottom-line cost savings of the service and know that the flexibility is there for me to adjust the backups when necessary to suit the business’ needs."

Martin Brokers is the world’s longest standing wholesale broking firm in the financial markets and is headquartered in the City of London. Its customers are typically financial institutions such as banks, pension funds, hedge funds and insurance companies. Martin Brokers provides international access to the best rates for a range of financial products, such as long and short-term financing, commercial paper, certificates of deposit, forward foreign exchange, bonds, medium term notes, private placements and derivatives. These all rely on the company’s IT setup to provide robust and always-on access to continually shifting market data.

Scott Martin, IT Manager of Martin Brokers, commented: "Our employees all pay for their own IT services, so I needed to give them the assurance that the business could continue to run in the event of a disaster through a failsafe yet affordable online backup system. With 12 employees in our IT department, we have the capacity to implement online backup in-house, but this would be an expensive and proprietary task if we were to opt for the best-of-breed software. Therefore, I needed to find a technology partner that provides best-of-breed software and corporate class managed services, but at a fraction of the cost compared to an in-house implementation."

Choosing the Managed IT Services Provider "After approaching a number of service providers, oncore IT immediately stood out due to its massive cost savings of GBP63,000 per annum compared to our previous online backup provider," commented Martin. "Combined with the provision of a hands-on account manager, plus the proactive ability for us to access a backup report at anytime, oncore IT’s OLB (Online Backup) service was the obvious choice."

oncore IT holds an unrivalled position amongst its managed online backup peers as all client data is backed up to its NOC (Network Operations Centre) located in one of Level 3 Communications‘ highly resilient tier 1 global data centres, followed by a secondary replication to its offshore data centre in Paris for extra precaution. In its entirety, the Martin Brokers backup service is monitored on a 24×7 basis to ensure all backups are successful. The oncore IT team of technicians proactively manages all backups to ensure minimum downtime and business continuity.

Further benefits which Martin Brokers
viewed as differentiators included:

• the agentless nature of oncore IT’s backup software, which removes the typical need for an agent to be installed on every server;
• the flexibility of being able to archive data going back as long as seven years;
• the data compression ratio of 4:1 to reduce storage costs;
• the adherence of the service to all critical business compliance laws, such as the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) legislation from the FSA; and governmental approval from the Department of Defence.

The Implementation oncore IT first implemented a trial for Martin Brokers in mid-October 2008 with a view to signing a contract after 3 months, but Martin switched ahead of schedule to the full service on 1st November 2008 due to his confidence in the service. In line with its annual test data restores, oncore IT carried out a disaster recovery simulation for Martin Brokers, which was successfully completed in just five minutes.

Among the business critical applications backed up and archived by oncore IT, including emails, databases, spreadsheets and CRM tools, are BOSS, a ticketing system used for daily brokerage volume reports, and Vantage, a market data system that provides brokers with essential reports and analysis from Reuters. This mass of data is backed up securely by oncore IT almost as soon as it is produced, on a daily basis, to ensure backup set is always up-to-date. In order to provide a record of key operations and to comply with data storage legislation, oncore IT deploys its BLM (Backup Lifecycle Management) service to intelligently store Martin Brokers’ data for up to seven years at a lower cost than short-term storage mediums.

oncore IT also backs up Martin Brokers’ geographically dispersed remote offices centrally and remotely from its client’s London headquarters, removing the need for local backups at these office locations and speeding up the recovery of lost data to any office location.

The Results Martin concludes: "oncore IT has implemented a commercially viable online backup service with enough proven resilience to assure my managers that all IT systems would be immediately available if a disaster was to strike. Additionally, I am convinced by the bottom-line cost savings of the service and know that the flexibility is there for me to adjust the backups when necessary to suit the business’ needs. All in all, oncore IT supplies me with a commercially viable and proactive service which I am keen to continue using."

Future Services Planned Looking ahead to 2010, Martin Brokers plans to extend its disaster recovery plan by replicating one of its remote offices in Amsterdam as a disaster recovery site.