them from taking extra supplies from
their regular workstations—and are
bused to the hot site location to perform
the day’s work.
“We make sure that one-third of
the people in each test group have not
gone through a recovery exercise before
so, over time, our entire staff has gone
through the process and is comfortable
with it,” says Laura Conklin, ACUITY’s
vice president of business consulting.
Testing has allowed ACUITY to
fine-tune both its systems strategy and
recovery processes. “We have really
sharpened our focus on zero-hour—the
minute after a disaster occurs. What do
you do? Where do you go? How can we
service our agents and policyholders
until our systems do come back online?”
says Conklin.
For insurers that maintain their own
redundant site and systems, the decision
is often based on seeking to achieve the
greatest level of control.
“Most of the carriers maintaining a
recovery site have decided they are better
off trying to marshal their own resources and control as much of the process
as they can,” says Don H. Donaldson,
president of LA Group in Montgomery,
Texas.
“In the event of a disaster, or even a
system interruption, it’s important that
we have an exact replica of our infrastructure configured the way we want it
to be, rather than just available computing capacity, which is why we have
continually decided against subscription-based services for our server-based
systems,” says Knuth.
Comfort in the Cloud
Because Wisconsin’s natural disasters
are typically limited in geographic range,
ACUITY is comfortable that the location
of its hot site is a sufficient distance from
its headquarters. However, for insurers
in states subject to wide-reaching disasters such as hurricanes or floods, there is
an additional consideration.
“After Hurricane Sandy, companies
that had recovery sites in the same geo-
graphic area couldn’t access those sites,”
Furtado says. “Insurers were suddenly
realizing the benefit of a cloud-based
disaster recovery resources, more than
the brick and mortar approach.”
“Our cloud-based disaster recovery
allows us to spin up capabilities quickly,”
says Brian Flynn, CIO of Crawford &
Company, which uses SunGard Avail-
ability Services as the foundation for the
technology component of its recovery
plan. “Combined with server virtualiza-
tion in our data center and continuous
replication between our environment
and SunGard, we can restore in a frac-
tion of the time compared to traditional
methods.”
Cloud offers potential advantages
of lower cost and greater flexibility to
respond to business growth than an
owned-location strategy. However, there
is a potential downside.
“The Achilles heel of the cloud
or subscription-based model is less
control,” Morency says. “Even if you
can perform regular tests at the disas-
ter recovery provider’s site, there is an
inherent weakness in terms of potential
inconsistency between the production
and recovery systems. Those differences
can get bigger every day that goes past
the last recovery test.”
However, interest in cloud as a
disaster recovery strategy continues to
grow, particularly among insurers that
also leverage the cloud as an operational
strategy. At Island Insurance in Hawaii,
a private cloud and virtualization using
VMware has allowed the company to
consolidate 75 physical servers into just
six that are connected to Island’s storage
area network.
“In addition to the reduction in
hardware footprint, there is a definite
benefit to failover,” says Jeff Fabry,
senior vice president, CIO, and CSO at
Island Insurance. “We can lose three out
of our six machines without any impact
on users.”
Maintaining a natively cloud-based
infrastructure also ties into Island
Insurance’s strategy of using cloud-based
disaster recovery services. “From a cost
and staffing perspective, we don’t have to
worry about maintaining our own data
center and infrastructure. There were no
additional skill requirements we needed
in order to use a cloud-based recovery
service because we already had the
experience from using our own private
cloud.”
“There were no
additional skill
requirements we
needed in order
to use a cloud-
based recovery
service because
we already had the
experience.”
Jeff Fabry, Island Insurance
