Infoworld, 2/6/6: Outsourcing the desktop
Outsourcing desktop management can shave costs while bringing relief to an assortment of infrastructure management headaches
By Dan Littman
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Last March, Michael Sher went from Plymouth Rock Assurance’s headquarters to take over as CEO of Plymouth subsidiary Encharter Insurance Group. He found a loosely knit group of seven insurance agencies spread across Massachusetts and Connecticut that lacked an internal IS department and an IT strategy. The company, says Sher, “had offices that were down for days at a time because we were dependent on a guy in a truck ... a home-town fix-it guy ... who was charging us money to drive around to all the offices.”
Sher says, “When I got there I said, ‘no way; this is too Rube Goldberg.’” He hired CenterBeam to take over.
Between CenterBeam’s off-site servers and Encharter’s in-house client machines plus paper records, the agencies have triple backup. Also, Sher says, CenterBeam’s communication and storage is certified compliant with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which regulates protection of personal information — an important consideration for an insurance company.
Another CenterBeam customer, Henry Svendblad, CIO of Millennium Partners Sports Club Management, says that CenterBeam confers SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards 70) compliance, which will help him obtain a “cyber insurance” policy against data theft. His company, which runs 10 sports clubs in six cities and has 1,500 employees, is a recent acquisition of a bigger real estate development firm. He adds that CenterBeam’s operations also maintain Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance, which trickles down to his organization.
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