Cristie Software's latest Customer Case Study: Kwik-Fit Financial Services.
Product: TBMR
Overview
Launched in 1995 to provide an insurance offering to customers of Kwik-Fit garages, Kwik-Fit Insurance has grown rapidly in the 17 years since to become one of the UK’s leading personal lines insurance intermediaries.
Originally offering car insurance, the intermediary has expanded to incorporate a host of personal lines offerings including home insurance and breakdown cover with around one million live products. Kwik-Fit Insurance was the forerunner for what has become the Kwik-Fit Financial Services group. KFI is the largest broker in a group which also includes Express Insurance, the specialist car and motorbike intermediary (acquired in 2007) and The Green Insurance Company, an environmentally friendly intermediary who offset customer’s cars carbon emissions (launched in 2007).
KFFS was bought by Ageas (UK) Ltd in 2010 to strengthen their retail operations which include RIAS, Ageas Insurance Solutions and Castle Cover.
The Challenge
KFFS relies on a number of Fileservers running software applications which are key to the day to day operations of the business. Running a fully operational contact centre is essential to keep customer service levels high and ensure that the corporate aims of a fast, courteous and professional service are maintained.
Following a corruption of the OS disks on one of the critical fileservers, it took several days to recover fully and had a major impact on the service level. The decision was taken to look into how best to reduce outage time involved in this kind of problem to an absolute minimum and avoid experiencing such a detrimental outage again.
The Solution
TBMR was introduced to KFFS by their IBM partner
Barrachd as a product that was unique in the way it worked closely with their existing backup software (TSM), meaning that it could be introduced with a relatively small amount of extra work and could be maintained alongside their normal backup schedule.
TBMR was installed to protect a number of the most critical servers for the contact centre to help get recovery times significantly reduced in the event of another failure and to reduce vulnerability to customer service levels.
The Resulting Benefit
TBMR installation on the contact centres’ critical servers has given great peace of mind to management and have yet to be ‘used in anger’ to recover from a failure. The further implementation of
TBMR is now being evaluated to extend coverage to other parts of the estate after recently suffered a glitch and having both OS disks on a document scanning fileserver fail at the same time, which led to four days of solid work to get the application running again and the database restored. Purchase costs of
TBMR to protect servers that are less critical to the business but still involve extensive time and effort on behalf of the support teams to recover, are justified when evaluated against this kind of manual recovery.
“Sometimes a good hardware maintenance contract and a good data backup schedule just isn't enough to ensure that services can be recovered quickly. Our experience shows that there is a significant gap here and we are relying more and more on TBMR to fill this gap.” - Duncan Waddell, Second Line Team Lead, KFFS
TBMR Product Overview
TBMR provides fast automated recovery for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) users. In the event of a server failure, TBMR will recover the operating system and applications direct from the TSM backup. The recovery can be to the original or to new dissimilar hardware or to a virtual machine.
- IBM recommended solution for BMR for TSM - find out more
- Rebuild a server OS in under ten minutes
- Uses the TSM backups for Disaster Recovery
- Multiple servers can be recovered simultaneously
- TBMR is the ONLY software that can recover direct from the TSM server without performing a separate backup
Find out more at:
www.cristie.com/products/disaster-recovery/tbmr
Contact Cristie Software
Email:
sales@cristie.com
Tel: +44 1453 847000
Web:
www.cristie.com
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