Willis - Managing risk

Before Willis could commit to its new approach to disaster recovery, it needed to evaluate the proposed data replication technology and its impact on the company’s existing IT infrastructure.

Willis is one of the world’s leading risk management and insurance intermediaries with 14,500 people in 300 offices in 100 countries. It offers a wide range of strategic and operational services, such as loss management and risk transfer, across a diverse set of industries. Data is vital to the provision of these services, but Willis’ existing disaster recovery solution could no longer meet the demands of the business. As Eoghan Doyle, UK technical services director for Willis, explains: “In the advent of an emergency, rebuilding a replacement environment could have taken a week.”
The need for a more responsive disaster recovery solution was accentuated by the company’s planned transition from localised IT provision to a global model. “Prior to this, local disasters would only have had a localised impact,” says Doyle. “Now we could be looking at downtime on a global basis, which could cost us millions of dollars.”
Willis was keen to use its existing IT assets – housed in data centres in the UK and US – to underpin the solution. This posed a challenge: how to find a reliable and cost-effective way to replicate data between the two transatlantic sites.

As one of its preferred IT suppliers, Willis consulted Computacenter, who helped by first identifying a number of potential products. This resulted in a solution from data protection specialist Kashya being chosen. Prior to committing to any roll-out, however, Willis needed to validate the reliability and functionality of the solution.

“We needed to be able to prove the solution in advance, but without impacting the resilience of our production systems,” notes Doyle.
“To prove the data replication solution we needed access to a storage area network (SAN). Carrying out such tests on our production SAN was not a viable option.”