Old Mutual South Africa and IT industry leader Internet Solutions have signed an outsource agreement for Web-hosting infrastructure services. This agreement offers Old Mutual a managed, secure, fully redundant Web-hosting environment with high-speed Internet connectivity.
Old Mutual provides several key e-services to clients and intermediaries via the Internet, including fund, client and financial management. One of the key challenges of the outsource agreement was to design a solution that would enhance the Web front-end performance without impacting on the back-end response times, a task which has now been completed and contracted for.
Old Mutual`s Web execution environments will be located in secure Internet Solutions data centres in Cape Town and Pinelands. The migration of the Old Mutual Web execution environments to the Internet Solutions data centres are expected to be completed by April 2003.
The migration to the new environments has been phased to limit the impact on existing services offered by Old Mutual. This infrastructure will be proactively monitored and demanding service level agreements have been contracted for to meet Old Mutual`s business requirements for performance and availability.
Old Mutual will take advantage of Internet Solutions` local and international bandwidth to route data directly to and from its customer base. Internet Solutions will use expertise gained from being certified as the only Cisco (MSSP) Managed Security Service Provider outside of the US to manage the security of the Old Mutual Web-hosting environment.
The hosting environment at Internet Solutions ensures higher reliability of Old Mutual`s servers and other networking devices. State-of-the-art technology has been used to create the most favourable environment for server and network devices to ensure business continuity services. Old Mutual will have access into the operational environment of Internet Solutions through the online Customer Zone. It will also have real-time access to detailed information such as the amount of traffic served from hosted services, status of the last data backup run and much more.
Derick van Rooyen of Old Mutual says: "As an international player in the financial services sector, it became very important for us to be able to provide a fast, easy and safe Web-hosting environment. Our 'partnership` with Internet Solutions helped us do just that. Internet Solutions has helped maximise the customer experience to our Web sites while keeping within our financial parameters."
The key to success is that outsourcing does not mean a loss of control. Instead both partners can play to their strengths. Internet Solutions manages the day-to-day running of the infrastructure, while Old Mutual focuses on its core competencies in providing an excellent service to its clients.
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