Case Study:
HSB Australia
HSB Australia is an Australian licensed insurance company operating in all states of Australia. Founded in the USA in 1866, HSB now operates in all states of Australia.
HSB Australia provides tailored engineering insurance to protect businesses against a range of equipment failures. Their insurance can also be partnered with their inspection services, providing advice on maintenance contracts, compliance and workplace safety.
Business Requirement:
For a relatively small business with under 100 staff in Australia, HSB had some complex requirements stemming from their need for genuine 99.9% uptime across a diverse range of applications. These include several custom SQL server databases, an intranet, extranet, and web applications, and an Email Archive and Content Management System. HSB also required an ongoing support and maintenance plan for their range of complex systems.
The Solution:
Business Broadband:
As with many of our IT projects, First Focus deployed our Network engineering team to start with HSB's inter-office Wide area network. After configuring their Layer 2 WAN across SHDSL and Fiber-optic Ethernet links, we also connected their head office to our data centre to provide internet connection failover, content filtering and network access to one of our Co-location areas.
IT Projects
Once network reliability was established, we then built redundancy into the applications. A wide area cluster for SQL Server and Exchange was set up between HSB's head office and our data centre. This provides HSB with a true hot-site failover solution in the event of a disaster or server failure. We also performed several legacy system upgrades, deploying a new Network storage solution, Exchange, SQL, and IIS servers.
IT Support
Of course, in order to maintain the high levels of reliability, a custom support plan was created for HSB, based on a First Focus Platinum Support plan. First, all servers and network devices were configured in into our 24x7 monitoring systems, providing a constant watch over all critical devices. Next, we implemented a range of server maintenance tasks, alternating upgrades between the primary and redundant environments. A First Focus Technical Account Manager was also assigned to co-ordinate the work performed by our Engineering, Help desk, and Field Service teams.
The Results:
HSB now has a professionally designed and managed IT solution, and their availability requirements have been met and exceeded. HSB staff now can call First Focus' help desk for general IT support, and they have a Technical Account Manager who co-ordinates everything from Domain Name registration to failover testing.
"By providing a reliable and flexible solution designed around our needs, it has given me the confidence that our infrastructure is being managed by people who have a good understanding of our IT systems."