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Challenges
- Provide evidence of network and application performance issues
- Reduce mean-time-to-resolve issues
- Enable business to accelerate multi-cloud strategy
Outcomes
- Industry-leading uptime
Establishes two-hour SLA on resolving any application or network downtime, half the industry standard. - Meaningful reporting
Delivers performance insights across multiple public cloud platforms and API interactions using dashboards - Powerful visibility
Provides insight into 7,000 endpoints accessing the corporate network
Accelerating service delivery as financial services go digital
Admiral is a UK-based insurance business that has developed enormously in its 30-year history. Starting as a car insurance specialist, the business has grown to include home and travel insurance, personal loans and car finance. Today, it employs more than 11,000 staff and operates in eight countries.
The growth of Admiral has coincided with seismic changes to the financial services industry. For insurance, digital engagement has transformed how consumers explore, compare, buy, and submit claims. Pricing is far more transparent, and it is easier for consumers to switch suppliers.
Admiral 2.0 is the company’s plan to accelerate the speed of service delivery. Being faster to market with relevant, personalised services will enable Admiral to create a point of difference in a crowded market. This presents a huge data challenge; Admiral currently serves nine million customers and issues up to four million insurance quotes each day.
“There is business value in analysing the data, but managing that data is incredibly complex,” says Luke Erickson, head of IT service operations, Admiral Insurance. “Our business has gone from a couple of on-premises data centres to having data spread across multiple clouds throughout Europe. We need to be responsive, flexible and cost effective in our cloud choices.”
Business services have gone from requiring minimal network journeys, to extensive. It is critical Erickson’s team understands these journeys to detect and resolve issues before they impact the customer experience.
“We want to see network trends, but what’s most important is visibility of any changes in network performance in real time,” he explains. “I want to quickly rule in or rule out possible root causes. For network engineers, they want to prove it’s not a network fault.”
Delivering key performance insights across multiple cloud platforms
ThousandEyes provides powerful visibility across the complex reality of Admiral’s modern network infrastructure. It delivers key performance insights across multiple public cloud platforms and the crucial API interactions required for modern application experiences.
“It is incredibly useful for us,” says Erickson. “It takes us straight to the root cause of an issue.”
The adoption of ThousandEyes was fast-tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Admiral went from 70 users working from home in February 2020 to 7,000 by March 2020. ThousandEyes—already being tested in an Admiral sandbox environment—was able to quickly establish visibility into 7,000 endpoints all looking to access the corporate network.
“We then spent a year mapping out different customer use cases and network journeys for all business services. That design was so thorough it then took only two weeks to deploy,” Erickson explains. “ThousandEyes fits our needs perfectly.”
The adoption of ThousandEyes, he adds, was engineer-led, but it has ignited the broader IT team.
“We have a team of 35 looking at change management and network operations. They’re the first to respond in the event of an issue. Our engineers recognise ThousandEyes to be best-in-class, but our CIO has also got onboard. He now has access to the dashboards and reporting. He understands the importance of network health.”
Industry-leading resiliency across multi-cloud infrastructure
Admiral has established what it believes is industry-leading resiliency across its multi-cloud infrastructure. It has a two-hour SLA on resolving any application or network downtime; the industry standard, mean- while, is four hours.
“The financial services sector is pretty hot on addressing downtime,” says Erickson, “and we’re well within the two-hour SLA. We haven’t come close to two hours in the last 12 months. That’s the power of ThousandEyes.”
Greater uptime means greater productivity for 7,000 hybrid-workers and error-free performance across Admiral’s digital channels. “The dream is a 24/7, high performance digital experience for all customers,” Erickson concludes.
Are you curious to learn more about ThousandEyes and how our innovative solutions have transformed the businesses of our satisfied customers? Visit our Customers page to explore real-world testimonials and case studies that showcase our unique value.
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