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Challenges of Protecting Insurance Data

Insurance organizations operate at the vanguard of disaster recovery planning, being perhaps the industry most immediately affected by catastrophic events. They require, at the bare minimum, the capacity to immediately resume business operations and effectively administer policies to cover policyholder losses in the event of disaster interruptions, while resuming other business-critical operations with minimal downtime. With almost no tolerance for business interruption, insurance organizations face greater disaster recovery challenges relative to many other industries.

Most large agencies have now started to streamlined insurance operations electronically and reduce the amount of paper information. Client notes, policy changes, accounting documents and all documents related to insurance transactions as well as customer information must be maintained as organized records, and year after year the management of volumes of insurance data becomes increasingly problematic. Additionally, many states impose regulations that require insurance organizations to maintain accessibility standards for archived insurance data.

Typically, an insurance company will rely on digital tapes to conduct daily or weekly backups, and store those tapes either onsite or in an offsite facility. However, tapes carry inherent risks to business continuity which are beyond the control of the user. Additionally, with all the paperwork involved in insurance business operations, usage quickly outgrows storage capacity and tape backup becomes grossly inefficient as a means of storage. For protecting large volumes of critical data, tape is simply too problematic:

• Tape is unreliable, with failure rates as high as 20% to 50% for data recoveries
• Backup tapes remain vulnerable to physical damage or theft
• Tape backup is slow, labor-intensive and results in large backup windows, costing your company staff productivity and profitability from the administrative overhead entailed

Complete Data Protection for Insurance Industry Organizations

Conventional backup and recovery with tape is simply insufficient to meet the needs of insurance companies in the event of a disaster. CRC’s online backup offers solid peace of mind to protect business operations, as well as many immediate advantages over tape backup.

Secure Offsite Data Backup - First and foremost, our Enterprise Data Backup & Recovery securely transfers data offsite to a fully redundant, disaster-hardened data storage facility, ensuring the integrity of your information.

Agentless One-Touch Backup - CRC’s online backup works differently from other backup & restore processes. It doesn’t require that you install and run software on each and every machine. Instead, an authorized administrator-user can protect an unlimited amount of servers, databases, desktops and laptops from a single point using agentless backup technology. It eliminates the grossly inefficient process of backing systems up to individual tapes and having them shipped offsite via truck to a tape library, and frees up valuable human and network resources to improve your firm’s productivity.

CRC’s online backup has features that deliver:

• Redundancy: Two (2) Secured, Redundant Data Centers
• High Availability: N+1 Hardware Grid for Failsafe Performance
• Business Continuity: Continuous Data Protection for Up-To-The-Minute Backups
• Fast Backups: WAN-Optimized Architecture for Reduced Backup Windows
• Fewer Interruptions: Hot Database Backup for Protection of Systems Online

Secure Long-Term Archival of Documents

CRC DataProtection addresses challenges of managing archival or inactive insurance data and documents with features optimized to both manage archives efficiently and affordably while also meeting regulatory compliance standards for accessibility of information:

• Record Alteration or Destruction – CRC’s long-term archival process creates digital certificates for destruction of data, creating a clear audit trail for any manipulation of data
• Retention of Complaints – CRC DataProtection provides for the long-term retention of all insurance-related data
• Production of Records – Electronic financial records are kept current, are backed up, and are available for retrieval or restore at the touch of a button
• Message-Level Restore – CRC DataProtection provides fine degrees of specificity in data recovery, to the level of a single email message

By virtue of the fact that it is designed for maximum usability and audit control, organizations large and small gain credibility and peace of mind simply by utilizing Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)-compliant Enterprise Backup & Recovery from CRC.

Reduce Data Backup Costs While Gaining Enhanced Levels of Protection

CRC offers peace of mind that sensitive insurance policy data is protected and can be retrieved if lost due to a natural or hardware disaster. Our online backup can reduce the administrative and storage costs associated with large tape libraries, and our disk-to-disk backup and restore process ensures your business continuity by getting you up and running fast.

If you work in the insurance industry and want to implement a more reliable disaster recovery strategy while reducing costs, contact us today. Evaluate our service, and we’ll show you just how easy it is to guarantee that your most valuable business asset - information - is always available, no matter what.