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How Bennetts saved time and made auditing easier with Octopus
About Bennetts
Bennetts is a bike insurance specialist for over 230,000 motorcyclists in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Established in 1930, Bennetts has over 90 years of experience and has become one of the fastest-growing insurance providers in the UK.
Approximately 200 staff, based in Coventry and Peterborough, provide competitive quotes to over 350,000 riders annually. Bennetts works closely with a panel of top UK insurers to ensure customers get the best price for their requirements.
Challenges
Bennetts needed an intuitive tool that provided better visibility
Before switching to Octopus, Bennetts used Microsoft’s Release Management (RM). But the team found it difficult to maintain, operate, customize, and audit. They couldn’t see what they’d deployed where, and onboarding new team members was time-consuming, with too much handover required.
Solution
Easy auditing and less manual work with Octopus
Octopus Deploy was the clear solution for Bennetts, addressing all the company's concerns.
The team found Octopus Deploy:
- Intuitive and easy to use
- Helped them eliminate custom scripting
- Made auditing easy
- Let the team address other unexpected issues, delivering more than just deployments
Value
Automation and time savings with compliance in check
Quick onboarding
Thanks to Octopus Deploy being user-friendly, Bennetts has eliminated onboarding and handover when new members join the team.
Easy auditing
As a financially regulated company, audit trails are critical for Bennetts. Octopus Deploy’s clear and easily accessible records ensure everyone is following regulations.
The Bennetts team told us that producing data to audit their deployments would be the easiest information to extract from the whole lifecycle.
Time savings and automation
Before introducing Octopus, Bennetts wrote all its deployments as PowerShell scripts and ran them via Microsoft’s RM. When the team moved to Octopus, they simply renamed the deployment script and set a deployment process step to run it. The setup was quick and straightforward.
Problem-solving and efficiencies
Octopus allowed Bennetts to use agent-based deployments, a model better suited to the company. Octopus also helps the team with other tasks, like:
- Health checks to receive alerts on disk space used and certificate expiry dates
- Copying log files from machines rather than remoting onto them
- Recycling app pools when an app has a memory leak
- Resetting the system time via PowerShell (they did this when the time on the server changed and prevented login)