The office opened on the landlord's date, not the IT plan's
The complete technology estate for Burns & Wilcox's new Dubai insurance office: infrastructure, security and operations from a standing start, delivered ahead of schedule.
The challenge
CARE Insurance Brokers, a thirty-year-old Dubai firm newly acquired by Burns & Wilcox of the UK, was opening a new office in Dubai World Trade Centre and needed a complete technology estate from a standing start. There were no legacy systems to lean on, the go-live date was set by the office opening rather than an IT programme, and stakeholders sat in three time zones across the Middle East, the UK and the US. The estate had to meet the standards a UK and US insurance group would sign off, including anti-money-laundering systems, data security and compliance handling specific to insurance broking. A greenfield estate sounds simpler than a migration; in practice it means every decision, from device standard to firewall segmentation, is made for the first time under a fixed date.
What we built
More than twenty specialists ran the engagement in four phases: business and technology assessment, a technology blueprint taken through investor approval, delivery and commissioning, then managed services. The estate combined a Dell data centre with enterprise storage, a segmented network secured with Fortinet enterprise firewalls and access points, Lenovo end-user devices, Microsoft enterprise licensing, and the CRM and AML system infrastructure insurance operations require. We also rebuilt the firm's web presence in phases alongside the infrastructure. Onsite engineers and maintenance contracts carried the estate from commissioning into steady operation. Because stakeholders sat in Dubai, London and the US, the blueprint phase produced one document every party could approve, and investor sign-off came before a single device was ordered.
What remains
The office opened ahead of schedule with zero business disruption, giving the group a faster Middle East market entry than a conventional build would have allowed, and the estate has run under our managed operations since. What remains is a scalable, compliant foundation the group can extend, and a working understanding of the insurance ecosystem that has informed how we approach insurance platforms since. Managed services began the day the office opened, so there was no gap between commissioning and steady state.
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