Summary
For a global enterprise such as Marsh McLennan, network availability is directly tied to operational resilience. The company’s teams, applications, and client-facing services depend on reliable connectivity across offices, cloud environments, and business platforms. Any disruption to the primary network can create operational risk, delay access to critical systems, and impact service continuity.
As a firm whose professionals support clients through risk, insurance,consulting, and workforce decisions, Marsh McLennan depends on uninterrupted access to the systems and services that support client engagement and business operations. Disaster recovery planning therefore requires more than backup applications and replicated data. The network itself must remain available so users, systems, and services can continue communicating during disruption.
Marsh McLennan uses Graphiant to provide an extremely cost-effective disaster recovery network that is reliable, operationally simple, and independent from its primary connectivity provider. Instead of maintaining an expensive standby network sized for peak capacity but used only during exceptions, Marsh McLennan is building a secondary network model that delivers provider diversity, disaster recovery continuity, and elastic economics aligned more closely to actual usage.
Customer Overview
Marsh McLennan is a global professional services firm that helps organizations manage risk, build resilience, and support workforce and business strategy. Operating across a broad portfolio of businesses and geographies,Marsh McLennan relies on secure and dependable network connectivity to keep employees, applications, and client services available.
As the company continues to modernize its network architecture,resiliency remains a strategic priority. Marsh McLennan needed a disaster recovery network approach that could support continuity scenarios without duplicating the high cost and complexity of a second fully provisioned primary network. The goal was to add reliable network diversity, reduce exposure to primary provider disruption, and maintain financial discipline without compromising readiness.
Key Values Delivered
- More than 85% cost savings: compared to alternative disaster recovery network vendors
- Diverse secondary network path: independent from the primary connectivity provider
- Reliable access to critical services: during disaster recovery scenarios
- Usage-aligned economics: that reduce spend on idle standby capacity
- Simplified disaster recovery network model: without duplicating the primary WAN architecture
- Improved resilience posture: through provider diversity and elastic network capacity
Creating a Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Network Model
For large enterprises, disaster recovery networks have historically been expensive to justify. Organizations often had to purchase secondary circuits,reserve dedicated capacity, or contract with alternate vendors for services that remained idle most of the time. While these networks were important for resilience, they created a significant cost burden because the enterprise was effectively paying for capacity that was rarely used.
Marsh McLennan needed a more efficient model. The company wanted disaster recovery connectivity that could support critical services during disruption,but it did not want to carry the economics of a second full-scale primary network. Traditional disaster recovery network options made that difficult because pricing was commonly tied to fixed capacity commitments, long-term contracts, or vendor models that assumed always-on utilization.
With Graphiant, Marsh McLennan is establishing a disaster recovery network that is both resilient and economically aligned to expected demand.Instead of overpaying for standby capacity, Marsh McLennan is using Graphiant to create a secondary network path where spend scales more closely with the capacity the business needs to consume. This allows the company to maintain resiliency without recreating the cost structure of its primary network.
For example, when normal operations are running through the primary provider, Graphiant can remain available as a cost-effective secondary path. If a disruption occurs, Marsh McLennan can use Graphiant capacity to keep critical services connected without having previously paid for a large amount of unused standby bandwidth. The operating model changes from paying for insurance capacity all the time to maintaining resilient access with economics that better match real demand.
The result is a disaster recovery network strategy that gives Marsh McLennan reliable secondary connectivity while reducing the cost of standby network capacity by more than 85% compared with alternative vendors.
Maintaining Service Continuity During Disaster Recovery Scenarios
Disaster recovery planning requires more than application redundancy.Even well-designed recovery environments can be difficult to operate if users,systems, and services cannot reach them during a network disruption. For Marsh McLennan, the ability to maintain connectivity during outage scenarios is essential to keeping professionals connected to the platforms and services that support the business.
In previous operating models, disaster recovery connectivity often depended on expensive secondary providers or pre-provisioned circuits that were difficult to scale and costly to maintain. Enterprises had to decide whether to pay for a large amount of standby capacity or accept the risk that connectivity might not be available when needed most. That approach made network resilience expensive and limited flexibility during real-world recovery events.
With Graphiant, Marsh McLennan is building a disaster recovery network model that supports service continuity without requiring the company to carry excessive standby network expense. Graphiant provides an alternate connectivity fabric that Marsh McLennan can use to keep critical services reachable when the primary network path is unavailable.
For example, during a disaster recovery event, users can continue reaching recovery environments, cloud-hosted applications, and operational platforms through an alternate network path. Rather than treating network recovery as a manual, provider-dependent process, Marsh McLennan is establishing a more flexible secondary path that is ready to support continuity when the business needs it.
The outcome is a more resilient operating model in which critical services remain accessible during disruption, recovery environments can be reached more reliably, and Marsh McLennan can execute disaster recovery plans with greater confidence in network availability.
Reducing Primary Provider Dependency with a Diverse Secondary Path
Provider diversity is an important part of enterprise resilience. If a company’s primary provider experiences an outage, performance issue, or regional disruption, a secondary path from the same provider may not provide sufficient independence. Marsh McLennan needed a disaster recovery network that introduced meaningful separation from its primary provider while still meeting the company’s cost, reliability, and operational requirements.
Traditionally, achieving this level of diversity required a second major provider relationship, duplicate connectivity services, and additional operational overhead. Enterprises often had to manage multiple contracts,parallel provisioning processes, separate support models, and redundant capacity planning. While this improved diversity, it also increased complexity and spend.
Graphiant allows Marsh McLennan to reduce correlated provider risk through a more efficient model. By using Graphiant as its disaster recovery network, Marsh McLennan is creating a secondary connectivity option that is not dependent on the same primary provider architecture. This gives the company a stronger continuity model without forcing it into a costly duplicate-network architecture.
A practical example is provider-level outage mitigation. If Marsh McLennan’s primary provider is affected by a service interruption, Graphiant gives the company an alternate network path that can support critical connectivity needs independently from the primary network. This helps Marsh McLennan maintain separation between primary and disaster recovery network services while avoiding the financial burden of maintaining a second always-on network at full scale.
The result is improved resilience through provider diversity, reduced dependency on a single primary network path, and a more practical approach todisaster recovery connectivity.
The Graphiant Advantage
Graphiant gives Marsh McLennan a practical way to strengthen disaster recovery readiness without recreating the cost structure of a second primary network. By delivering a highly reliable disaster recovery network with provider diversity, service continuity support, and usage-aligned economics, Graphiant is helping Marsh McLennan strengthen continuity while reducing cost by more than 85% compared to alternative vendors.
Instead of forcing the company to choose between resilience and financial efficiency, Graphiant enables Marsh McLennan to maintain a scalable and cost-effective secondary network that is ready when the business needs it. The result is a modern disaster recovery network model: diverse, reliable,economically efficient, and designed to support continuity during disruption.
