Customer Case Study: Myron Steves: insurance solutions

Myron Steves is a broad-based insurance agent and wholesaler with strong property, casualty and healthcare divisions. Myron Steves is one office with four locations. Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin. Houston is headquarters. Healthcare, Information Technology, Claims, Policy Auditing, Customer Care (policy issuance, endorsements, etc.), Compliance, Accounting, Finance, Human Resources, Premium Finance, etc. are in Houston. Offices in San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin are Business Development offices with marketing and underwriting teams.

The Challenge:

Faced with tape-based data protection challenges, including complete backup failures, slow backup times that exceeded available production windows and completion failures over multiple days, Myron Steves needed to find a reliable backup with performance that would ensure that backups were completed in allowed windows.

The Solution: DS3 DataVaulting and Asigra Televaulting services

Myron Steves turned to DS3 DataVaulting for a reliable and easy to manage data protection solution that delivered fast backup and retrieval of company data with an extremely low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

DS3 DataVaulting uses Asigra Televaulting, a WAN platform solution that delivers backup/restore service as a utility. Working closely with DS3 DataVaulting, a leading provider of scalable enterprise-level data management solutions, Myron Steves began initial testing of Asigra’s agentless enterprise-class off-site backup and restore service.

Delivering superior data protection, and improved data management capabilities for Myron Steves, corporate and policy data is protected with an automated scheduled backup, encrypted “at-rest” and “in-flight,” from Houston to DS3 DataVaulting’s data vault in Fairfax, Virginia where it is available for restoration 24x7 in the event of an emergency or major disaster. DS3 DataVaulting then mirrors Myron Steves data to a secondary data vault in Allen, Texas for an additional level of data protection.

Initial testing involved a full backup of a server that took four hours to complete using Myron Steves tape system. Using Asigra Televaulting, the backup was finished in 30 minutes. Other backups proved an increase in performance by a factor of eight to 10 times greater than tape.

Weekend tape backups of their GroupWise server had also been extremely problematic for Myron Steves, with the insurance company experiencing GroupWise performance issues and having extreme difficulties completing tape backups in the 60+ hour window between the end of business on Friday and start of the work week on Monday morning. Using Asigra, Myron Steves first full GroupWise backup was completed in 21 hours, and subsequent incremental backups are now completed in less than two hours every night. Asigra Televaulting features WAN optimization techniques such as global common file elimination to the block level, incremental backups and compression.

Results:

• 100% reliability
• $200,000 savings over tape in 3 year period
• 45% reduction in costs

“Asigra Televaulting continues to impress us with its performance, ease of use and 100% reliability, delivering secure and high speed backup with a low total cost of ownership,” said Russell Bennett, IT Manager for Myron Steves. “Over a three-year period, using Asigra will save our company more than $200,000 when compared with the cost of using tape – a 45 percent savings – delivering vastly improved backup reliability with highly significant savings.”

“When your job is to protect large, extended enterprises, you simply don’t fool around – you need a solution such as Asigra’s Televaulting that is proven and secure to safeguard your data,” said Stacy Hayes, vice president of operations and business development of DS3 DataVaulting. “Asigra delivers a means for companies to choose best-of-breed data protection regardless of their physical location, allowing businesses such as Myron Steves in Texas to successfully use a Virginia-based company such as ours for ongoing data protection.”

Myron F. Steves and Company:
Myron Steves is a financially secure, entrepreneurial managing general agency that provides an exceptional insurance product to professional insurance agents. Myron Steves, is a 50 year old Managing General Agent/Wholesaler with two divisions, Property and Casualty an Healthcare. For more information, visit www.myronsteves.com.

DS3 DataVaulting:
DS3 DataVaulting solutions feature regulatory-compliant best practices and state-of-the-art offsite data vaulting facilities designed to ensure persistent availability of critical enterprise data. Leveraging DataVaulting service, clients can reliably protect all mission-critical information resident on servers, desktops, laptops, and home-office PCs.

Asigra:
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office online backup/recovery with more than three petabytes of data under protection. Since 1986, the company’s agentless Televaulting solution has centralized data management and eliminated the pricing and performance problems created by agent-based tape backup software in multi-site enterprises. Televaulting addresses state, Federal and international regulatory compliance demands by backing up remote/branch office data to the data center. Data is encrypted both “in-flight” over the WAN and “at rest.” Televaulting is offered by leading resellers and service providers worldwide including HP and DS3 DataVaulting to deliver highly secure data protection. Privately held Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with partner offices located globally.