Remote Cloud hosting offers LAMP high speed access to mission-critical systems

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Legal and Medical insurance specialist turns to ramsac to give its Chinese office full-speed access to corporate systems

Leading IT solutions consultancy, ramsac has provided legal and medical insurance company LAMP Group with fast, reliable world-wide access to its critical business systems, addressing slow connections for the company’s office in China and providing remote access for all its global offices. ramsac recommended and facilitated the hosting of LAMP Group’s software on servers with Rise DataCenter’s on Demand™ platform, providing the company with a solid and cost-effective platform with scalability for long-term future growth, along with disaster recovery protection.

Founded in April 2005, LAMP Group provides specialist insurance for the legal and medical industries. With offices in the UK, Gibraltar, Thailand and China, the company’s global staff all need access to the same corporate systems. Many policies are issued via the internet, making a secure and infallible network critical to the everyday function of the business. LAMP had also started work on a new proprietary healthcare insurance system that would need to be accessed by staff worldwide and it was therefore vital that the company found a highly reliable hosting solution which offered global remote access.

Alan Strange, Underwriting Director at LAMP Group Limited, commented, “We’ve used Citrix virtualisation software since we set up the company, hosting on-premise hardware in our office, used primarily by remote workers in the UK and Gibraltar. However, Citrix doesn’t work particularly well in China due to the internet speed, firewalls and government control. So we needed a system that was going to be available 24/7 but with fast access anywhere in the world. We didn’t have a fast enough internet connection in the UK to make using a virtual private network a viable option and the healthcare system needed to be hosted somewhere that could offer all staff dedicated and fast internet access – to be used equally well in China or the UK without performance or access suffering.”

Having relied upon ramsac since founding the company, LAMP asked the IT provider to suggest a solution. ramsac recommended hosting the software on servers within Rise’s DataCenter on Demand™ platform during both the development phase and after the system went live.

“The system is still in development so we’ve got both development servers and live servers at the moment,” reports Strange. “We were able to spin up a test server fairly quickly. It’s currently on the test servers, and when we switch to live it’ll be fairly straightforward to just copy it across to production servers. So we can replicate it over easily when we’re ready.”

As LAMP Group Limited outsources all of its IT support needs to ramsac, it can focus its IT resources on in-house software developers. “The only IT staff we’ve got now are development programmers. ramsac set up our on-premise hardware and service it for us with a 24/7 helpdesk providing support to our staff regardless of location or time zone. The hardware, and all of the technical aspect of the network are outsourced to ramsac, who visit on-site every week and deal with any problems we’ve got at that time.”

“Our new healthcare software is basically a policy and claim system which is proprietary to us,” recounts Strange. “Once it’s live there’ll be between twenty and thirty users from all around the world on Rise’s cloud-based servers. That will grow over time as we increase our business in other countries. It’s going to be a system that works worldwide.”

LAMP has realised a new-found level of scalability with the cloud-based system and it has offered dramatic improvements in terms of added-value, as Strange explains, “We looked at the options and what the most cost-effective solution was over a number of years. Comparing the two, the cloud-based system was more cost effective than purchasing new servers – saving the company thousands of pounds.”

LAMP has also found that the platform delivers improved efficiency in terms of speed and has provided the ideal platform for future growth as Strange concludes, “We can add users quite easily without buying new infrastructure and we’ve got disaster recovery as part of the solution as well. The system has been developed so that it would support a much bigger business than we’ve currently got, so we won’t be a few years down the line having to get another new system. It’s given us a solid platform for growth that doesn’t restrict what we can do going forward.”