With 24 million customers, 14 million of whom are in France, and a turnover of more than 32.6 billion euros, CNP Assurances is the leading provider of personal insurance in France.

CNP Assurances needed to implement a disaster recovery plan (DRP) to preserve the integrity of its customers’ data and to guarantee continuity of service for its IT systems. In addition to the data centre continuity of service, CNP Assurances planned to extend the continuity of service to individual workstations, to manage its applications at all times and from any location.

The first stage involved establishing a virtual environment for the 150 employees of its IT department. Having evaluated proposals from various manufacturers, CNP Assurances opted for the VPCC solution from NEC. This comprises virtualisation servers, two management servers configured as a high-availability cluster, an SAN storage system, and thin clients. CNP ASSURANCES has gained:

• Continuity of service IT personnel can access their virtual workstation at any time and from any location, even from outside (VPN).
• Security The absence of any local storage system makes access without authorisation impossible and guarantees that usage complies with the strict security policy of CNP Assurances.
• Performance By removing all data exchanges to the servers and the SAN, VPCC streamlines network traffic and improves application performance.
• Ease of administration A single console is able to manage the virtualisation servers and the client configurations, making it easier to keep applications and security up to date.
• Reduced maintenance and electricity costs Each workstation uses 8 to 10 times less energy than a traditional PC. This should reduce the energy bill by 50%. The reliability of the terminals extends their product life up to 6 years.