This article is more than 1 year old

Tech-for-insurers biz out of action for 10 days now. Hope they had, er...

SSP tells The Register 'We are aware of the issue'

Hapless insurance tech biz SSP Worldwide is now on its tenth day of a services outage, which has had a huge impact its broker customers.

The company was hit by a power blackout on 26 August that fried its HP Storage Area Network.

Halfway through the process of a restoration six days later, the business was struck with further disaster. SSP was working with HP to deal with the original damage to the disks when the work was interrupted by a recurrence of the original problem.

According to SSP, the biz works with "8 of the top 10 UK insurers, 4 of the top 10 global insurers and over 40 per cent of UK Brokers."

Apparently SSP has a mirror data centre and it could have switched its operations there, but the decision was taken to try to repair the main one as the mirror was some 15 minutes behind - he said.

A spokesman from SSP said the company was "aware of the problem" and would issue an update in due course.

The Register asked the company for its most recent statement, but it has not yet responded.

In a statement sent to Insurance Age today, SSP said it is testing a replacement system for the IT that failed last week and hopes to have it up and running soon. The business said it is switching to an alternate site for the broker services.

It told IA: "The SAN... comprises a large number of storage disks, grouped into cassettes, over which the business and configuration data that supports our systems is housed. It was damage to a small number of these disks following the exceptional disruption to power supply that caused the original loss of service."

From tomorrow, the company said it would contact brokers directly to provide details of when it expects to have systems available.

SSP's blurb reads: "SSP is a global provider of technology systems and solutions across the entire insurance industry, using our expertise to enable our customers to transform their business and increase their profitability.

The firm’s broking technology usually processes transactions worth over £5bn gross written premiums and over 1.1 billion internet insurance quotes annually, it says.

Users on Twitter were not impressed.

"SSP provides core technology solutions, distribution and trading capability, advanced analytics and solution delivery."

According to the company's accounts for the full year 2015, the business posted operating profits of £17.5m, up from £15.2m the previous year. Revenue was £68.5m, up from £65.7m. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like