The IT organisation of this global insurance enterprise, one of the largest in the world, had, during sustained period of rapid business growth, developed into a fractured business. The disparate nature of the structure meant that each country operated as a standalone unit, with the regional IT organisations planning and operating independently with no alignment in technology platforms, standards or teams.
The result of this growth was that the countries within each of these regions had their own IT operations teams, their own products & technologies, their own configuration standards and their own operational tooling. The net effect was a business encumbered with huge, unmaintainable IT operations with costs that were disproportionate to the businesses size, caused by having to manage and operate the wide range of technologies and applications.
Further, the company’s agility was fettered by the inability of the different regions to have visibility of, or gain access to, data across other parts of the organisation, reducing its competitiveness and impeding its ability to operate as a truly global enterprise.
At a glance
WhiteSpider approached this work by employing their ea4 framework, a proven methodology that standardises the delivery of IT services. This 4 stage approach is flexibly adapted to projects of differing scopes and scales, and in this work the emphasis was on the ‘Audit’ and ‘Architecture’ functions of the framework.
Audit
WhiteSpider carried out a series of IT strategy and solution audits to determine:
Architecture
The output of the audit work was used to develop enterprise reference architecture models in order to start to create standards in terms of IT services, platforms and features for the global enterprise. The business benefit of these standards is to ensure that each instance of a technology deployment or change follows a standardised model and framework of configuration. Such a model, however, gives individual teams and organisations flexibility of technology choice to ensure optimum cost and performance.
From this, WhiteSpider created a reference architecture library that covered the following ICT services and architectures:
These elements were provided as a centralised reference library for all the regions to standardise on their specific set of features, functionality and platforms.
The result of the reference architecture library was to give the organisation a framework within which to start to create and build a structured and standardised IT estate. With a standardised approach to developing and deploying architectures the organisation gained significant benefits:
Visibility
Enabled cross regional visibility of the infrastructure, enabling a ‘follow the sun’ support model and reducing the global operational footprint.
Financial performance
Reduced the cost of ownership of IT through the use of a global standards for delivering technologies throughout the enterprise, such as:
Agility
Improved agility of delivering new services across the organisation with standardised technologies.
WhiteSpider are consummate technical experts and design authorities for all things network and security related. Their capability and technical solutions, in both operational and architectural disciplines, are second to none. They have vast experience in data centres, security & networks and the results they deliver are nothing short of outstanding.
Vice President of Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture & Engineering
Established in 2012, WhiteSpider specialises in providing consultancy, strategic advice, and practical support in enterprise service architectures. The company helps organisations to standardise their IT and communications infrastructures by using a unique new service framework – ea4 – developed specifically with the needs of global enterprises in mind. Headquartered in the UK, WhiteSpider works with global companies across a range of industry sectors, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, construction and motorsport.
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