Success Story

BoostEdge accelerates and secures AXA - Direct Assurance's website

Description of the business

Direct Assurance, a subsidiary of AXA, was created in 1992. The company soon became the French leader in phone and Internet car insurance, and is now one of the fastest-growing indemnity insurance companies in France. In 2004, more than 400,000 new customers enrolled with Direct Assurance to benefit from competitive rates, excellent coverage and complementary services on car and home insurance. The needs of these customers are served every day by a team of over 600 insurance experts.

The problem

"The www.direct-assurance.fr website is the main point of contact between Direct Assurance and its customers, explains Thaï Pham, Direct Assurance's IT Resources Manager. "All our services are available online through this site. In fact, Internet customers represented 40% of our new revenue in 2004. Our site is currently expanding; we provide up to 3,000 partner rates each day, and roughly 300 to 400 customers are online at any given time. We also have a completely secure customer area which allows our users to perform tasks like looking up, updating and downloading information, or asking for quotes." According to Stéphane Chargy, Direct Assurance's Internet Project Manager, bandwidth usage reached its maximum capacity last year. This left us with two options: either double the available bandwidth at a considerable cost, or find another solution."

Solving the problem

"We started by doing some researchs, says Stéphane Chargy. BoostEdge was brought to our attention by an article in the paper Le Monde Informatique, which compared several web acceleration solutions and placed BoostEdge first. We tested two solutions, one of which was ActivNetworks' BoostEdge 600. The BoostEdge performed better, and offered a exceptionally simple configuration program and a range of efficient administrative tools. Our bandwidth usage was reduced by half or more. We also really liked the HTTPS acceleration, which reduced the load on the application server considerably." We took about a month to perform the tests on our development site, Stéphane Chargy continued, "because we wanted to be methodical about our choice. We started with unit testing to check how the BoostEdge 600 integrated with our existing applications, and then moved on to load testing and finally a pre-production test with our Hosting Partner (MGN - Prosodie). BoostEdge turned out to be the ideal solution to our most crucial problem: preserving the IP addresses of our visitors and partners while still providing acceleration. This was one of the key requirements for our system's security. BoostEdge 600 was the only solution that was able to preserve these adresses without needing any reconfiguration at all."

Thaï Pham concluded, "The improved response time wasn't one of our initial requirements; we thought that improving the bandwidth usage would have little impact in that area. But we've actually found that response times have improved for our users now that the BoostEdge 600 units are installed. We were also impressed by BoostEdge 600's SSL acceleration capabilities which have allowed us to reduce the load on our servers for end-user secure connections. The customer area of our web site has really benefited from the installation of the BoostEdge 600 units. Based solely on the gains in bandwidth, we estimate a return on investment that's less than two years. Our site now has better response times and SSL encryption, and better still, we did not need to change our security methods."

Key benefits

• Bandwidth usage has been reduced by half or more

• Users have noticed that response times have improved

• SSL acceleration decreases the load on main servers providing secure connections to users

• No need to redesign security systems; BoostEdge functions transparently, allowing the web servers to continue tracking end-user IP addresses