Insurance Company’s Application Recovery Times are Decreasing Every Year with Managed Resiliency

A large insurance company, which boasts over $1 billion in yearly revenue, was a longtime Sungard recovery account customer using mainframe, IBM Power Systems, and x86 services. When Sungard’s pricing and inability to recover within their contracted environment proved to be too much, Recovery Point swept in to offer our orchestration solutions. After a successful proof of concept test, the recovery contract was awarded to Recovery Point. We recovered all Tier 1 applications in four hours across every platform, a deliverable Sungard could not accomplish within their defined 96-hour recovery window.

Insurance is an “always on” industry. The claims process can’t go on hiatus; customers expect 365/24/7 service. In today’s marketplace, insurers are challenged to operate seamlessly through constant cyber threats, tightening compliance regulations, and sensitive information security – all while maintaining fund transfers, data analysis, and information exchanges in real-time.

During its tenure with Sungard, the client became frustrated that Sungard had been unable to manage a single successful DR test. What often happens is the service provider is unable to integrate operationally – and changes made to systems and applications are mishandled or orphaned and never applied to the DR environment. “We don’t plan real DR scenarios, they just happen,” noted the client. “Our former provider didn’t come close to delivering what was within our prior program and contracts.”

The situation was improved by Recovery Point, a true disaster recovery partner who understood the complexity of the client’s systems and applications and was able to restore confidence in their managed disaster recovery service by guaranteeing that a new partner could achieve their RTO and RPO.

The client uses Recovery Point’s Managed Resiliency service, a next level disaster recovery solution that restores business processes at the mission-critical application level, not just at the data and server levels like legacy DRaaS services. By leveraging IT orchestration and automation software, our Managed Resiliency service offers real-time visibility and tracking of disaster recovery events.

A no-cost Proof-of-Concept test with storage array replication, an RPS-specific solution for IBM Power Systems, Veeam, and orchestration software was the first step. After a successful test, exceeding expected SLAs, DR documentation was then placed into the runbook.

The implementation took three months to set up. This work included change management, which required extensive collaboration with the client. Managed Resiliency comes with the Resiliency Console, a dashboard that offers a dynamic view into server and application recoveries as well as tracking end user testing requirements. This feature proved to be a valuable asset for the client’s IT team. Recovery Point also schedules ongoing DR validation testing to proactively find issues. Twice a year, Recovery Point runs mock actual testing with internal validation. Any changes are automatically updated into the runbooks.

Recovery Point not only hit the SLAs, we completed everything in one day. Recovery results include:

Tier 1: 4 hours

Tier 2: 8 hours

Tier 3: 24 hours

Tier 4: 48 hours

It’s important to note that the DR scope of work with Recovery Point involved more servers and applications than with Sungard. Recovery Point accomplished more in a half day of testing than Sungard could accomplish in four days.

Improvement in the DR time during recovery has been a game changer. “With Sungard, we had a 96-hour test window. They failed to deliver the full recovery within that window. With Recovery Point, we’re down to 13 hours and within the defined SLAs,” said the IT lead at the insurance company. “Because of the success of the recovery, we have available time to go through and figure out if there is something we can change or update.”

Our client also enjoys quick response times from Recovery Point. As the client moves more of their systems to the cloud, an open line of communication and a rapid response to potential problems saves time and money.

With Managed Resiliency, our client’s actual application recovery times are decreasing every year. This is particularly important since it’s been estimated that each minute of downtime can cost a business up to $100,000 a minute. With Managed Resiliency, this insurance company is prepared. “We’re not doing this just to pass a test,” said our client. “We’re doing this testing to actually recover in a real DR scenario.”