Boston Marks Insurance Brokers Takes Off Into the Cloud

Oncore IT Ltd announced that Boston Marks Insurance Brokers Ltd
(BMIB), an aviation industry specialist, has renewed a three-year managed
services contract and moved its IT to the cloud.

The agreement will see Oncore IT provide virtual server and application
hosting, desktop support, online backup and DR, 24/7 monitoring, along with SSL
VPN remote access technology and 100Mb leased line connectivity.

Boston Marks Insurance Brokers is a privately-owned independent wholesale
insurance and reinsurance broker and the London business of the Boston Marks
Group Ltd based in New Zealand. A Lloyds broker, BMIB provides a
range of insurance to the aviation sector covering airlines, executive jets,
airports, contractors, ground handling companies, products and completed
operations, rotorwing, general aviation, military and other coverage applicable
to aviation risk.

The group purchased broker Norman Butcher & Jones in 2011 to form BMIB and
establish itself in London as it expands internationally to service customers
effectively. The London business employs 34 staff.

The broker has been a long term Oncore IT customer with a relationship dating
back to 2005.

Tony Orpwood, Boston Marks Insurance Broker’s operations manager, says: "The decision to outsource at that time was
driven by the need to upgrade our unreliable legacy systems which went down
regularly and appoint specialists to manage it. At the time, we had three IT
staff in-house and by outsourcing we recognised that substantial annual costs
savings could be realised which have been about 50%."

Further to a tender involving two other firms, Oncore IT was chosen because of
its IT experience and knowledge, physical security of its London datacentre and
offshore backup capability. In addition, location played a key part in the
selection as Oncore IT’s network operations centre and systems engineers were
close by so onsite server support could be provided quickly.

As part of the new contract, BMIB will now adopt a cloud-based solution
and move its key servers to Oncore IT’s data centre with the entire
infrastructure managed on a virtualised enterprise platform. These virtualised
servers will run BMIB’s key business applications which include
Office, Sun Accounts, Ceridian payroll software, and an insurance broker system
from GPM Development Ltd without which the business could not function.

Ralph Bull, Boston Marks Insurance Broker’s COO, says: "Totally shifting to the cloud is the new
component of our agreement moving forward. It solves a number of onsite server
load balancing management issues we were having and we anticipate performance
will increase with downtime guaranteed to be 1% or less."

BMIB was particularly impressed with Oncore IT’s recent investment in Hitachi Data Systems‘ unified storage and
content platforms, along with blade infrastructure.

Ralph Bull says: "The investment
means they have some of the best storage technology available, and our data is
managed on it. It’s a very proactive move for Oncore IT to be involved with HDS
with all the knock on benefits for us as a customer in terms of reliability and
availability."

All BMIB data will be stored on this new HDS platform in Oncore IT’s London
data centre and replicated to its Amsterdam facility to guarantee resilience,
leveraging 600 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth.

Paul Cook, Oncore IT’s sales & marketing director, says: "We’ve invested in building our environment
working with world class partners such as Asigra (backup), Brocade (data centre
switches and Ethernet Fabric technology( and now the final component – HDS – as
our key storage platform provider and the heart of our new storage brand, On
Data."

When Boston Marks Group acquired Norman Butler & Jones and BMIB was created everything in the business was reviewed from phones to photocopiers
to outsourced technology supplier.

Tony Orpwood concludes: "We didn’t
want to change our IT partner as we have been satisfied with what Oncore IT has
been doing and their capabilities. It’s just not cost effective for us to look
after IT ourselves so we’re pleased they’re on board. It’s a comfort factor
that the people with the right expertise and experience are managing our
systems providing us with the assurance we need to ensure our IT will work
properly day in day out."