SSP migrates NZ customers to Interactive’s Aus data centre

SSP, a global provider of cloud-based back office systems for the insurance industry has announced completion of the migration of its New Zealand broker customers to Australian provider Interactive. The move follows a failure in SSP’s own UK data centre that took SSP’s New Zealand customers, and others off the air for up two weeks.

In a statement SSP said: “Interactive provides multiple high availability data centres in Australia and is designed specifically to provide significantly higher levels of service. SSP’s non-broking customers in the region are also hosted on this data centre.”

SSP New Zealand manager, Samuel Finkle, said all SSP’s New Zealand customers were now hosted on the Interactive data centre, which the company believes has the levels of resilience needed to avoid potential major outages.

Finkle said test environments had been created for every customer to mitigate any potential concerns following the outage last year. “A number of customers have now been on the new system for more than a month [and] we have received positive feedback regarding the new architecture.” 

One customer, Rosser Underwriting managing director, Andrew McFetridge, said service levels had improved with the new hosting location.

“Since transitioning to the new platform, we immediately noticed the speed and stability of the system, the opening and uploading of our documents improved significantly.  We don’t have the same issues we used to have and it’s much better now that we have completed the migration. This has been a significant improvement which has helped our relationship with SSP.”

On August 26 2016 a power outage in Solihull UK caused damage to discs in SSP’s data centre storage area network leaving insurance brokers using the system unable to process quotations or issue insurance certificates.

On 10 September Insurance Business reported, “Two weeks on from the first downtime that occurred on August 26 and it appears there is still no clear idea as to when all brokers will be able to return to doing business via the SaaS platform.” It said the outage had put some businesses in jeopardy.

In January 2017 SSP was hit by another, lesser data centre outage, the blame for which it laid on Equinix. SSP said the failure, at Equinix’s Powergate data centre in North-West London, had been the result of routine maintenance after it had been assured in advance that this would not affect services.

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Tags migrationservicesData storageoutagesAccessinteractiveinsuranceSoftware as a servicestabilityfailurespeedSSPresilienceback office

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