Boosting Efficiency, Resiliency and Communications Through Migration to SD-WAN Solution
About Romero Insurance Brokers
Romero Insurance Brokers is an award winning insurance broker. Part of the Assured Partners Group, Romero works to provide a range of insurance products to business customers. The firm has offices across the UK, with the bulk of its presence in the north of England, along with four remote sites and employees working from home.
“Principle Networks talks to us in a language we can understand. The team is very easy to deal with, and Romero’s IT team now know where to turn to gain the valuable service and support we need to keep our business running efficiently.”
Mark Noble, IT Director at Romero Insurance Brokers
Company growth meant that the firm needed to find a smarter way of working. To enable strong and reliable connectivity and collaboration across Romero’s workforce, the company sought to increase bandwidth and improve resilience and reliability across all its locations.
A key priority was to source an IT partner that could provide strong levels of technical support but also allow the business to maintain control of its own network with increased visibility. This would enable Romero’s IT team to proactively manage issues and solve faults more quickly and more efficiently.
The Challenge
Romero had been running on aging technology with silos of infrastructure across several vendors making for a disjointed approach with a limited disaster recovery strategy. Sites would often report that employees had lost visibility of the network, and the hands of the internal IT team were tied due to a complete dependence upon Romero’s incumbent IT service provider.
Romero began to look for a new provider that could offer a co-managed support model so that Romero’s IT team could maintain control of the network whilst leveraging guidance and support when required. The firm wanted to consolidate its infrastructure so that it became easier to manage, whilst improving bandwidth and resilience to enable its team of remote and office-based workers to collaborate effectively with bolstered productivity.
The firm also needed a way to combat outages, particularly at Romero’s head office which is located close to Leeds-Bradford airport – the highest airport in England and an area prone to power outages.
“This is a big step forward for Romero. The project involved lots of different moving parts but was handled seamlessly by Principle Networks. It was a very smooth process with zero downtime.”
Mark Noble, IT Director at Romero Insurance Brokers
The Method
Principle Networks was recommended to Romero by a mutual connection and Romero’s IT Director, Mark Noble, was impressed with the firm’s passion for customer service - knowing that he needed to find a provider with which his IT team could build a strong working relationship.
The initial requirement was to migrate Romero’s MPLS to an SD-WAN solution to improve resilience and reliability across all UK sites. Principle Networks worked with Romero to audit its systems and then redesign internal and external IT operations to keep pace with its rapid business development and disparate workforce.
The team created a plan to redesign the existing wide area network which included a refresh of all the firm’s hardware, firewalls and comms lines between head office and the remote sites. Higher bandwidth circuits were installed as part of the SD-WAN and a new WI-Fi link was installed at the head office.
Backup links introduced across all sites mean that should an issue arise, for example, a power outage, the network fails over immediately with no manual intervention required from the Romero team, boosting resilience and taking downtime to zero.
Key results.
Romero is now using an increasing number of applications across the business, something which has been facilitated by the introduction of SD-WAN. With dual circuits at all locations improving resilience, the team has recently been through an exercise to increase the bandwidth at various sites to allow for a change in the way that the teams are now operating.
A robust disaster recovery process has now been implemented, and any issues or outages are dealt with swiftly – before the Romero team is even aware that there has been a problem.
Romero’s internal IT team is benefiting hugely from the support it receives from the Principle Networks helpdesk with proactive alerting keeping the team informed while knowledge sharing is helping Romero’s technical team to grow and supplementing expertise.
“The support team at Principle Networks is in constant communication, keeping us updated on network health and proactively alerting us to potential network issues. This means that problems are now resolved before they have even become a concern for us. Patching is carried out swiftly within 24 hours of vendor release, meaning that our infrastructure is always up-to-date from both a continuity and security perspective.”
“The support team at Principle Networks is in constant communication, keeping us updated on network health and proactively alerting us to potential network issues. This means that problems are now resolved before they have even become a concern for us. Patching is carried out swiftly within 24 hours of vendor release, meaning that our infrastructure is always up-to-date from both a continuity and security perspective.”
Mark Noble, IT Director at Romero Insurance Brokers
Guided by process.
Discover
Our customer journey begins with a deep understanding of your business strategy, challenges and goals. We assess if our value proposition matches your requirements, outlining how we can guide your transformation.
Define
Next, we run interactive Architecture Workshops to explore possibilities. We shape adaptive plans leveraging leading modern architectures like SD-WAN and Zero Trust. Our aim is for you to feel informed and excited by the personalised value we can jointly deliver.
Design
With your feedback, our experts refine detailed solutions using open cloud platforms/tools to meet your needs. Through an iterative, agile design process, we create optimal architectures focused on scalability and security. You'll gain confidence we're building a future-ready platform that drives your success.
Validate
Before finalising, we validate the solution matches your priorities via a Checkpoint review. By aligning on desired business outcomes and target technology state, we ensure your needs are addressed.
Output
The output is your transformed, co-managed open architecture and roadmap, tailored to current and future objectives. With flexibility to adapt as your priorities evolve, you gain an agile infrastructure that empowers your business now and in the future.
