Challenges
- Distributed, global IT environment was costly to maintain
- Employees had poor access to corporate applications and information, which limited global collaboration
- Many international locations were hampered by inadequate bandwidth and infrastructure
Benefits
- Projected cost savings of $30 million over five years
- Consolidated two data centers into one and removed servers and other IT infrastructure from many international offices
- Consolidated 200 major applications, including Microsoft Exchange, and several thousand small applications into one location
- Improved employee access to information globally
Overview
Willis Group Holdings Limited (www.willis.com) is a leading global insurance broker, delivering professional insurance, reinsurance, risk management, financial and human resource consulting, and actuarial services to institutions around the world. Willis has more than 300 offices in 100 countries, with a global team of approximately 16,000 employees serving clients in 190 countries. Willis is publicly traded (NYSE: WSH) and generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2007.
The most significant benefit of the Riverbed solution has been Willis’ ability to consolidate its technology infrastructure, while improving the user experience and allowing remote workers to collaborate seamlessly. Given the high costs of operating and maintaining both data centers in Nashville and Ipswich, Willis had previously explored consolidating the two, but was unable to do so because of high latency across the global network.
Solution
- 107 Steelhead appliances deployed around the world
- Clustered Interceptors deployed in the main U.S. data center
The insurance world is all about information, and a significant challenge of our business is getting access to information quickly and efficiently.
Eoghan Doyle, Director of Infrastructure and Operations
Willis Group
The ability to cluster the Steelhead appliances using the Interceptor helps us increase the capacity and also provides very good fail over capabilities
Eoghan Doyle, Director of Infrastructure and Operations
Willis Group
