Page 289 - DMGT303_BANKING_AND_INSURANCE

Banking and Insurance

Notes
The company's growing pains.
Aviva India uses multiple applications like a custom-built policy administrator system,
CRM and other financial applications. Most of these applications have been primarily
running on the Windows Server platform. These applications coupled with infrastructure-
based applications like File Serving; Mail Server Proxy Servers etc. were primarily running
on multiple physical servers in their data centre. They had been procuring multiple of mid
range and high-end servers for their data centre and branches from IBM.

The fundamental challenge was managing these multiple servers with multiple islands of
storage physically and remotely. A huge recurring investment was being made on the
purchase of additional infrastructural support to meet their expansion needs in India.
Additionally, they were facing performance issues with the servers.

All in all, Aviva required an integrated solution that would provide them the following
benefits:

1. Better manageability through server consolidation.
2. Create redundancy to support criticality of their applications.
3. Flexibility to scale up servers as and when required.

4. Low total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure.
The IBM solution.
Aviva Life Insurance, India chose IBM as its partner in its efforts to improve business
performance and enable flexible business growth. IBM has consulted Aviva on the
virtualisation of the computing environment. "Realising the value from storage
consolidation, Aviva was geared up to introduce new and challenging concepts like server
virtualisation and physical consolidation", says Abir Basak, Senior Manager, IT
Infrastructure and Networking. This provided ease of operations in managing virtual
machines and also creating new servers on the fly, whenever the business needs increased.
Aviva's disaster recovery initiative has also been setup using IBM technologies to ensure
higher productivity and optimal capacity utilisation.
Details
Application Policy administration CRM, Financial application, File Server

O.S
Platform
The result - Life is simple.
The server consolidation has enabled the client to simplify their IT infrastructure and
further their expansion plans in India by moving the existing servers to Aviva's new
branches across the country. The benefits of server consolidation include - low total cost of
ownership, increased availability, better manageability, enhanced scalability and freedom
from redundancy.

The robust and secure IT infrastructure deployed by IBM enables Aviva to cut down the go
to market time substantially and offer new customised products and services to the
customers, as per changing market dynamics and demand.

Source: //www-07.ibm.com/in/casestudies/case_aviva.html

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