Nutanix Cloud Software Allays Stakeholder Concerns Compromising Digital Plans at FBD Insurance
London, UK. – 29 September, 2020 – Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX) a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has announced that its Enterprise Cloud solution has been chosen by FBD Insurance to replace the Irish insurer’s legacy data centre architecture as a key first step towards digital transformation.
Selected following exhaustive competitive testing, the Nutanix cloud software was chosen primarily because of its ability to match the agility, on-demand scalability and easy manageability of public cloud services, while also addressing concerns of key stakeholders reluctant to see business critical applications move out of the data centre.
“Although business and technology stakeholders were signed up to a wider cloud and digital first strategy, many were concerned that moving our core systems to the public cloud might lead to performance, security and compliance issues,” explains Enda Kyne, Chief Technology and Operations Officer at FBD Insurance. “However, once they saw for themselves that the Nutanix cloud software could deliver the same business, technical and economic benefits from within our existing data centre setup, that reluctance largely evaporated. Cloud technologies are no longer seen as a threat and we’ve been able to get back on the digital track.”
Virtualisation was another key differentiator, the Nutanix software winning out against the competition thanks to its AHV hypervisor available without additional charge as an integrated component of the Nutanix software stack.
“Like the business stakeholders, the technical team needed to be brought on side by convincing them that the Nutanix AHV hypervisor could deliver the goods,” comments Kyne, “so we tested it to destruction and were unable to break it. More than that, performance has to be seen to be believed. With AHV we can manage virtual resources from the same console as the physical infrastructure and move to 100% virtualisation, without the significant licensing costs associated with other virtualisation platforms.”
“Beyond solving our immediate on-premise issues, Nutanix software has enabled us to press ahead with our long term multi-cloud strategy and develop applications which can be hosted either on-premise or in the cloud and moved around to suit the business not the infrastructure or technology,” said Kyne. “Simply put, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is helping to enable us to transform our business and take advantage of the cloud on our own terms.”
“For our customers, we believe cloud should be a way of consuming technology, rather than a destination,” commented Dom Poloniecki, General Manager, Sales, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, Nutanix, “and many, like FBD Insurance, value having their cloud platform and data on-premise and at the heart of their IT operation. By opting to migrate its data centre to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, FBD Insurance not only gets the benefits of cloud on-premise, but the tools to integrate the platform with public cloud services to accelerate its digital transformation and enable application portability between private and public clouds.”
Since placing the order with Nutanix, Kyne and his team have deployed the Enterprise Cloud solution in the main FBD Insurance co-location data centre, along with a second cluster at the company’s head office for backup and disaster recovery. Existing workloads have been fully virtualised and migrated to the new architecture and the company is pressing ahead with ambitious plans to use it as a springboard for the migration of workloads as part of a multi-cloud approach.
About FBD Insurance
Established by farmers for farmers over 50 years ago, FBD Insurance has long moved on beyond those roots to become one of Ireland’s leading general insurers. Headquartered in Bluebell, Dublin the company has 34 branch offices staffed by over 950 employees and serving the needs of over 500,000 loyal and satisfied customers.
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making computing invisible anywhere. Organisations around the world use Nutanix software to leverage a single platform to manage any app at any location at any scale for their private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.
