Background:
As a technology-led company, a modern IT infrastructure is a key part of Institutional Protection’s global service offering.
Key Challenges:
- The nature of the expanding business made capacity planning difficult
- Its existing infrastructure offered limited ability to scale-out
- The in-house IT team needed a robust, scalable, easy-to-manage, flexible platform to free up the team to focus on delivering value to the business
- The company was looking to enhance its business continuity and compliance functions
Scale Computing Solution:
IP has deployed Scale Computing’s hyperconverged HC3 platform along with a secondary off-site disaster recovery node for business continuity.
Business benefits:
- Simple and easy to manage IT infrastructure
- No additional licensing fees, training or certification needed
- Reduction in management time
- Improved business continuity with snapshots and cloning
- Compliance requirements improved with a secondary off-site node
- Ability to scale-out on demand
Institutional Protection – Providing investor action services globally
Institutional Protection (IP) is a global class and group investor action specialist, providing services exclusively for institutional investors. Based in London, IP monitors shareholder actions and financial antitrust cases around the world and provides recovery and advisory services to its global client base to enable them to manage the risk of participation in investor actions, whilst maximising their recoveries from losses relating to corporate non-disclosure, misrepresentation or fraud.
At any one point in time, there are several thousand investor actions in progress, with around 300-400 new actions brought each year across over 30 jurisdictions. In this increasingly demanding and complex landscape, IP’s comprehensive services, with its proprietary technology at its core, are ever more relevant and valuable to institutional investors.
The IP philosophy is simple: to ensure its clients understand where and how they are impacted by all group investor actions globally; to minimise the time and resources spent; to limit any risks involved and to maximise their financial returns whilst still retaining control of legal decisions.
IT Challenges
As a technology-led company, IP is committed to operating a modern IT strategy in order to offer innovative services, and as part of this approach, recently looked at upgrading its underlying IT infrastructure. IP has automated several of its business processes to offer a more accurate and rapid service. With this in mind, the company wanted to implement an IT environment that could support its critical services and continue to deliver on performance.
Andrew Ingram, CIO at IP commented, “One of the things that sets us apart in the market is our use of technology and we wanted our IT infrastructure to support this innovation and align with our business goals.”
Researching the market
IP evaluated the market extensively and considered options from Dell, Nutanix and Scale Computing, as well as looking at building its own hyperconverged platform using open source. Scale Computing offered the best value for money, and after a hands-on demo and further research, IP decided to work with partner NAS UK, and install the Scale Computing HC3 cluster along with a secondary off-site disaster recovery node.
Ingram noted, “We looked at a number of hyperconverged platforms, including building our own. but Scale Computing stood out in terms of value for money.”
Richard Goss, Sales Manager at NAS UK explained, “The scalability feature of the HC3 cluster immediately resonated with IP. The organisation was looking for a simple and easy to manage IT environment that would offer support now and in the future. We are always looking to incorporate the latest innovative solutions that meet growing customer demands, and Scale Computing’s cluster is perfect for organisations such as IP that are looking for the benefits of hyperconvergence in a platform that is simple and cost-effective.”
Deployment
Ingram added, “The deployment and installation was simple and straightforward with both NAS UK and Scale Computing on hand to help. We had a pre-site survey done to make sure everything was in place and all of our cables were measured up, which meant the process was neat and tidy, only taking a few hours.”
Key benefits
Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster offers a complete data centre in a box, with no additional software to licence, training or certification needed, allowing the IT team to focus on other business activities. With a specialist in-house IT team on hand, IP wanted to ensure that the platform wouldn’t need daily management, helping to free up time so that the team could add value to the growing business.
Ingram commented, “We are always looking for the best possible way to utilise our staff and we didn’t want to deploy a solution that would be difficult and complex to maintain. The simplicity of Scale Computing was a major advantage. We are also enjoying the added scalability provided by the HC3 cluster.”
Business continuity and compliance
The additional off-site disaster recovery node, also called edge computing, is providing IP with enhanced business continuity and geographical resilience. Scale Computing offers cloning, regular snapshots, failover and backup testing to safeguard against an IT disruption. Ingram noted, “Implementing a secondary node off-site for disaster recovery helped us to enhance our business continuity and compliance functions. The snapshots are so fast and easy to use that we are now able to move projects forward a lot more safely and easily than before.”
Future deployments
After a successful deployment, IP are also considering future plans to migrate away from its current service provider and onto Scale Computing’s cluster.