RSA Insurance Group Highly available SharePoint in a dedicated private cloud

RSA is one of the world’s leading insurance groups, that employs 40,000 people to provide products and services in over 140 countries.

Challenge

A strategic direction was set within RSA to move core services and applications to Microsoft technologies. The decision was made to setup a dedicated private cloud within the BT One Cloud data centres to provide Exchange, Lync and SharePoint to users globally. Intelogy were responsible for designing and implementing resilient, highly available production and pre-production SharePoint farms across multiple data centres.

Solution

The solution consisted of a large production farm and a medium pre-production farm within each data centre. Making use of SQL Always On technologies allowed us to synchronise data between the data centres, supporting a hot standby scenario.

A custom claims provider was developed to eliminate network latency when resolving entities in remote user domains.

The design of each farm allowed for a set of front end servers, a set of batch processing servers and dedicated search servers to support the large, global, multi-lingual user base, whilst providing resilience within each data centre. The platform needed to provide the SharePoint cloud app model as well as all standard and enterprise edition service applications, including SQL Reporting Services and Workflow Manager.

Benefits

The SharePoint platform provided a pivotal role in establishing RSA’s new messaging and collaboration environment. SharePoint features were used and extended to promote a corporate social network, host a corporate multi-lingual intranet as well as delivering areas for teams and communities to collaborate efficiently in conjunction with other Microsoft technologies such as Exchange and Lync.