Case Studies

Bell & Clements Disaster Recovery Testing & Solution – Bell & Clements

Bell & Clements Company Background

Bell & Clements Ltd is an accredited Lloyd’s broker with its headquarters in the City of London. For over 35 years they established a leadership position in providing insurance services to US coverholders and brokers. However, they are not just a user of technology, but leading innovators in the development of web-based portal technology for their own customers. In 2009, they launched a unique data management portal, ‘The Bridge’, which provides a level of real-time data analysis to customers. Their technology goes far beyond providing standard reports, to the provision of sophisticated analytics and modeled data.

The Challenge

“With such a critical dependency on our IT infrastructure, our business users have a very limited tolerance of ‘downtime’. Consequently, when their existing DR contract came up for renewal, we set out new criteria for performance and reliability and invited several companies to submit proposals. It was a long process, but it became clear that Covenco had set a high bar and delivered a very convincing Proof of Concept that satisfied all our expectations. Their exceptional knowledge of our backup solution, which we had already selected independently, enabled them to deliver a much-improved fail-over capability to their DR site.”

Mark Balcombe, IT Manager, and Associate Director, Bell & Clements

The Solution

Bell & Clements’ backup solution enabled them to create a local backup of their entire estate to disc, which was previously copied to tape for DR.

As business pressures changed rapidly, the need for a more aggressive RTO certainly became one of the drivers for a new DR provider. Equally important was the need to also reduce the risk of data loss to meet new RPOs. However, the overriding objective was to reduce the time for a full DR recovery from days to hours. Covenco configured the backup solution to replicate data and VMs to their DR site at Banbury. The replication schedule is defined by the critical status of each server. The replicated VMs are stored in a dormant ‘ready to run’ mode, such that they can be powered on and presented to Covenco’s Virtual Recovery Platform in a matter of minutes, enabling immediate fail-over, should Bell & Clements suffer a DR situation.

The Result

“Bell & Clements have successfully completed a number of DR tests at Banbury, achieving recovery times that exceeded our expectations.”

Mark Balcombe, IT Manager, and Associate Director, Bell & Clements

“The Bell & Clements solution design is a typical example of how Covenco deploys its knowledge of backup and recovery to tailor solutions that fit our customers’ needs. We simultaneously work with multiple backup technologies ensuring that we can offer a solution that’s suitable for our Customers’ environment. We do what is good for our customers not what’s best for the vendor.”

Gurdip Sohal, Sales Director, Covenco

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