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Insurance firm updates disaster recovery plans
Case study: The City network for the company that knows all about catastrophes

By Tony Hallett

Published: Tuesday 11 April 2006

Aspen Insurance Holdings Limited is a reinsurer - an insurers' insurer - that has grown rapidly. Events such as 9/11 and the more recent Hurricane Katrina disaster have upped activity across the insurance sector, and in 2004 that Aspen had to find a new gear.

After being spun off from a parent which used to do all the heavy tech lifting, it was told it had to stand on its own two feet - and fast.

"We literally had to build everything from scratch," says Andrew Turner, head of IT at Aspen for the past 18 months after a career that has encompassed a number of years with Royal & Sun Alliance and before posts at utilities and in transportation.

"And that meant designing, procuring, implementing and commissioning IT infrastructure."

Of course, being given a blank sheet of paper and lack of legacy kit and processes has its advantages, but by the time Turner and his team knew what they had to do, they had "three laptops, an overhead projector, a great opportunity - but just five months left".

Aspen has around 400 staff now. It is headquartered in Bermuda and has offices in Boston and - its newest - in Paris. But its biggest location is at 30 Fenchurch Street, in the heart of the City of London.

A tender was put out for a company that could handle hosting and network services. Turner and his team were clear from the outset that Aspen's strength isn't in managing premises.

"Running a data centre would distract me from working with colleagues [in insurance]," he says and he is generally an advocate of outsourcing.

The final choice of provider can be regarded as unsurprising on one had, surprising on another. COLT - short for City of London Telecommunication, back in the day - walked away with the contract, up against major, though unnamed competitors.

Aspen uses Verizon - the old MCI international network - on the other side of the Atlantic and for back up in Europe but says COLT could have equally been the winner of the bulk of the business if offices had been outside the Square Mile.

What's surprising is that for Aspen this is about much more than providing a network. There is the hosting - and Turner says he is eyeing a more "pay as you go service in the future" - but people are also at the heart of the deal, something you would normally be more likely to hear about a classic IT services deal or at least one of BT's wins of the past couple of years.

Turner adds: "We knew we needed collaborative partners" and in a statement a colleague goes as far as to describe COLT as providing "the people and the network that glues the infrastructure together".

Other suppliers include Cisco, for all sorts of networking kit including switch fabric, and HP, for storage area networks and blade servers, something Aspen and others in this sector need, not just for coping with surges in demand but for the type of complex modelling applications used by all catastrophe insurers at certain times.

In terms of back up, Aspen runs a mirrored facility in Amsterdam - close enough to get to quickly, far enough away to be deemed safe - and has some of its hosting done in west London, which is quite a distance from Fenchurch Street.

"The 7/7 London bombings heightened concerns," Turners says and it was on this date that data migration had been planned for its main office. It was forced to review those plans but the move still went ahead in time for a complete power outage in Bermuda the following week to be handled.

Aspen invoked its disaster recovery processes, using the Cable and Wireless network on that island, and all went to plan.

Turner is a pleased head of IT. He is looking at applications including desktop videoconferencing and greater use of voice over IP using Cisco IP handsets. One small win: they already display a dynamic share price ticker.

And the remaining challenge? He says: "It's [about solving problems for] my business colleagues - it's about always making our service more underwriting-centric."