Chesterfield Group

Chesterfield Group Limited is the UK parent of a successful, international insurance firm that first began trading in 1999. Today the group is a Lloyd's broker and has offices in Canada, USA and the UK. Ben Williams is Financial Manager for Chesterfield and has come to head up IT operations for the firm.

Business imperative

Chesterfield Group historically operated a three year renewal cycle for their IT assets, replacing most of its server and desktop equipment on this timescale. Recently, it elected to defer its normal procedure in favor of reviewing its strategic options for IT in line with its business objectives.

Competitive and regulatory forces meant that Chesterfield Group had a pressing need to become paperless, more compliant and secure. Ben and his team were also aware of just how much of their time was taken up responding to IT issues.

The solution

The starting point for consideration of cloud solutions was a conversation with GPM Development, who already provided Chesterfield Group with their business critical insurance trading system and network support. Having had their eyes opened to the possibilities, the Group invited four companies to tender their solutions.

GPM Development's successful selection was ultimately based on their locality, enabling them to offer hands-on support, and their ability to understand the size and nature of Chesterfield Group's business.

As Ben Williams, Finance Manager for Chesterfield Group says 'The cloud market seems to be typified by two types of provider. Remote, faceless ones that offer no hands-on support at all and those that demand the highest, most costly level of engagement.' GPM Development is, in that respect, a breath of fresh air, offering service that is intensive during initial migration to the cloud and flexible, in line with demand, thereafter.

The solution put in place by GPM entailed complete migration of Chesterfield Group's diverse server configuration to the GPM Nimbus Cloud at their secure data center. All workstations were then replaced with thin clients and configured to connect to Nimbus.

Business impact

Since the move to GPM's Nimbus Cloud the capital expenditure, downtime and distraction of hardware maintenance has been completely removed. Also, all users now benefit from up-to-date Microsoft licenses. These had fallen as much as six years behind, the cost and time taken in upgrading, being too great.

Business agility and continuity too have been radically improved by the move to Nimbus. Staff at Chesterfield Group offices are now 100% mobile across workstations and can even explore new home and overseas working practices. New starters and consultants are up and running in the office in a matter of minutes, compared to hours or days previously. And money previously tied up in hardware has now been used to lease a second route to the Internet, giving the Group a back-up in case of emergency.

Last, but by no means least, security and compliance are both improved since the move. The security measures in place at the Nimbus data centre fully meet the demanding standards of the finance and insurance regulators. Ben Williams says 'GPM are far more up to date and aggressive in their data protection than we ever could have been.'

Conclusion

Chesterfield Group was ideally placed to realise the many benefits that cloud computing has to offer businesses of their size; and they have done. In the words of Ben Williams 'We just wonder why we didn't do it a long time ago'. Their move to the cloud was made possible and made simple by GPM's unique approach to supporting cloud migration.

For more information, please telephone +44 (0)20 8686 9400.

Quickly operational from any location with internet access

As a company that has had past experience of the trauma of being unable to gain entrance to our building with no notice, through no fault of our own, we would like to express our relief at the knowledge that we now have an efficient contingency procedure to access our up to date data and email via the GPM Servo Disaster Recovery service.

Our latest test of this showed how quickly we would be operational from any location with internet access. Especially when compared to the previous scenario which involved installing from our backup tapes with the logistical nightmare and lengthy time scale that entailed.

It is hoped that we will not need to call on the service. However being in a multi-tenanted building there is always a danger that someone elsewhere in the offices will start a chain of events that results in the loss of a server. Our recent ceiling collapse due to flooding on the floor above, just two feet from our servers being a timely reminder of our vulnerability.

Sue Russell, SFP Metals