Business Challenge

Altius Insurance Limited (previously Alpha Insurance Ltd) was founded in Cyprus in 1993. The company operates in the insurance sector, covering all related services: life insurance, non-life (general) insurance, and health insurance. Altius Insurance Limited has over 60,000 customers, with $13.5 million in claim payments made to customers in 2018. Altius has offices in all the cities of Cyprus, with nine branches and a rather complex network, operating through several insurance agencies and consultants.

Altius Insurance Limited has nine sites, including 1 disaster recovery site, 8 physical servers, and 40 virtual machines. Virtual machines store Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. Customer data is stored in the databases. As they are required to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the company is obliged to provide data availability to all their customers, that is why backup, replication, and recovery are critical to the success of the insurance business. Without a proper backup solution, loss of income would have the greatest impact on the company. That is why ensuring business continuity is the key priority for Altius Insurance Limited.

Previously, Altius Insurance Limited relied on the backup to tape approach and transported the tapes to a different location. Tape backup took a long time and, what is more, there was no chance to see the progress of backup jobs. The IT team had to do everything manually, from starting the scripts to scheduling the jobs and verifying that backups were usable. Furthermore, the recovery process was a nightmare. And to make matters worse, sometimes, recovery would simply not work. Tape backup also required a level of expertise, as one had to be an expert in script writing plus have an integrated knowledge in server administration to be able to successfully administer and configure backups. Backups stored on physical tapes were not the optimal solution for the insurance company as operational recoveries were time-consuming and resource-intensive. Since the company could not afford to waste any more time and money on tape backup, it was time to move forward and invest in a reliable VM backup solution.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication was recommended to Altius Insurance Limited by their business partners. After a period of research, the company decided that the software solution was the best option for them. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides data protection functionalities for physical, virtual, cloud, and SaaS environments. The solution offers a wide range of features that help increase backup performance, boost reliability, improve recovery, while saving time and money.

“Installation and configuration were easy and straightforward. I strongly believe that NAKIVO’s developers and designers did a sound job on the product. Currently, we have NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on our Synology NAS and the option to connect hardware and software is truly awesome,” says Ioannis G. Andrea, Information Security Officer at Altius Insurance Limited.

The company backs up their virtual machines every single day, and it takes approximately six hours to back up the entire infrastructure. With backup copy, the company can create a copy of their backups and store them at a different location. While network acceleration helps to speed up VM backup and backup copy jobs. “Backup copy is so simple to use; you just select the VM you want to back up and that is it. No scripting, no coding, no nothing. With network acceleration, we get the option of utilizing the entire capabilities of our network connections. This functionality helped us increase VM backup performance for sure,” says Ioannis.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides recovery of full virtual machines as well as granular recovery of files and application objects. “Recovery options are awesome. We can recover an entire VM, a specific file, or a whole folder. VM recovery is a lifesaver, as the functionality eliminated the need to configure the server from scratch. We just recovered the VM from the backup and went straight back to work. Instant file recovery is the most used feature for us. Users accidentally delete or edit their files and want us to recover them. In just a few minutes, we have the file back,” says Ioannis.

Instant verification by NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows the company to instantly test VM backups and verify VM recoverability. With screenshot verification, results of the verification procedure can be viewed via an email report with the screenshot attached. “Screenshot verification saves us from the hassle of accessing each backup job to verify the reliability and status of the backup. Also, the email notifications are a great bonus as well,” says Ioannis.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects the IT infrastructure of Altius Insurance Limited and provides the company with improved VM backup performance, fast recovery options, and reliability of VM backups. NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows the insurance company to recover full VMs and well as files, folders, and application objects. With network acceleration, backup and backup copy jobs are performed at a faster speed. While screenshot verification, provides proof that all backup jobs are reliable and recoverable. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is 2 times faster than previous solutions that we tested. With the product, we gained fast backup jobs, ease of management, great notifications, and a reliable backup solution in general. Although, I cannot accurately estimate the amount of money NAKIVO Backup & Replication saved us, I can tell that the solution saved us a lot of time. Time that was spent on handling tapes can now be spent more productively,” says Ioannis.