For this major international provider of insurance services, reliable, high-quality connectivity is critical — and increasingly so as it pursues a strategy of migration to cloud-based services. Unfortunately, the company’s previous global network was struggling to keep up, leaving users dissatisfied and inhibiting productivity and growth.

Service quality and performance levels were proving inconsistent. Upgrading bandwidth was a time-consuming, inflexible process. Ultimately, the company felt it wasn’t getting value for money. To overcome these and other issues, the company changed its networking strategy. Instead of working with a single global supplier, it allowed each region to choose its own provider. In Europe, the company selected an IP VPN from Colt to connect its 150+ sites (offices and data centres) across six countries.

Resilient design and proactive monitoring ensure >99.98% availability

By choosing Colt, the company enjoys the scale and capabilities of an established international provider, combined with responsive, local-language support from in-country teams. The company’s European operations are benefiting from:

• Network quality, stability and resilience that support use of cloud-based services
• Guaranteed redundancy, with a guarantee of no single point of failure in the network design where required, thanks to Colt’s ownership of the networking infrastructure
• Ongoing migration from traditional voice services to cost-effective IP voice
• Much better value for money, with significantly improved service quality and higher bandwidth at a lower price

Spare capacity was built in to the IP VPN from the start to enable fast, flexible bandwidth upgrades — delivered within weeks, rather than months — as business needs change and evolve. As a result, the company was able to deploy Office 365 with limited network redesign. Now, as it plans for the future, the company is consulting with Colt to understand how advanced technologies such as SD WAN could meet its evolving business and networking needs.