US giant transitions, upskills and scales

WR Berkley Corporation is a Fortune 500 company that was founded in 1967 and has grown into one of the premier commercial lines, property, and casualty insurance providers in the USA.

Each operating unit in the Berkley group is targeted at a niche market requiring specialised knowledge of a territory or product. These decentralised operations work to long-term strategies which allow each to identify and respond to local market conditions and customer needs.

The Challenge

Berkley Insurance Company needed a regionally resident IT capability for its Asia-Pacific business consolidated out of Sydney to be responsive and supportive of its escalating operational requirements. It had previously utilised a shared services model sourced from the parent company in the USA, and this was the first instance of it setting up a substantially independent regional IT infrastructure and service operation. Agile business support and obligations to satisfy multiple regulatory and compliance requirements across the region, as well as American corporate standards, meant that the client needed a dedicated environment requiring extremely high security, resilience and redundancy yet be able to scale with business demand easily. As a result of company regulations Berkley was predisposed to use a dedicated on-premises solution with no public cloud facility.

The Datacom Difference

Datacom worked closely with the local Berkley team for a year to match the right solution and products to its stringent requirements. The group wanted its operations spread across multiple, appropriately distant locations so the decision was undertaken to separate equipment deployments in Datacom’s two Sydney data centres. This solution delivered a ten-fold capacity increase on its communication links and two independent diverse paths to each of its major offices over a three-year contracted term.

Results

The deployed solution featured top-line, infrastructural technology such as Dell Nutanix, VMWare, Palo Alto, Cisco, F5 and Veeam for back-up, and Citrix and Microsoft in both data centres. Datacom also ensured Berkley’s local team was up-skilled so that they could take the operational responsibility in-house but with continued escalation support from Datacom as needed.

The solution was achieved as a result of strong ongoing partnership engagement and transparent information flows. Datacom was trusted to deliver a great solution that saw the client save substantially on the final infrastructure delivery costs.

 

This solution delivered a ten-fold capacity increase on its communication links and two independent diverse paths

to each of its major offices over a three-year contracted term.