BayRisk Insurance Brokers

Insuring its Data with LiveVault

Customer Challenge:
Protecting its strategic customer database server from disaster

BayRisk Insurance Brokers – Servicing More Than 3,000 Clients
BayRisk Insurance Brokers knows a thing or two about the risks that businesses face each and every day. The independent insurance agency, in business in California for 35 years, provides commercial and personal insurance to more than 3,000 clients, providing them with a safety net in case disaster strikes.

The company’s Northern California location certainly has its perks, being located near the Golden Gate Bridge, wine country and the clear Pacific. But the location has its faults too – earthquake faults, that is. Over the past three decades that the agency has been in business, it’s suffered through several serious earthquakes – and it knows the next one could be right around the corner. In addition, California is often plagued by wildfires, including the Oakland fire of 1991 that came close to BayRisk’s office. BayRisk is extremely concerned about the risks of physical disaster, and thus, takes its data protection very seriously.

“The next big quake could strike tomorrow – and when it does,
our phones will be ringing off the hook,” said Kevin Milroy,
president of BayRisk Insurance. “For that reason, we can’t be
without our customer data for any period of time. We need to
have full access to it so we can provide our customers with a
measure of comfort that we’ll be there when they most need us.”

“Data Insurance” from LiveVault
BayRisk, like most companies around the globe, is increasingly relying on electronic data to conduct business. And while the company is stringent about its data protection because of the threats of fires and earthquakes, the reality is that the company is more likely to lose its data due to a server crash or an errant keystroke. For years, BayRisk backed up all of its company servers each night to tape. But tape drives get old and there are many risks of human error in the manual rotation process. On several occasions, BayRisk performed restore operations, but didn’t get its expected data back. However, BayRisk stuck with using tape to back up its servers, because it didn’t know there was a better way to protect its data.

BayRisk found that better way to backup and restore its data in late 2002. AMS Services, which provides software and services to thousands of independent insurance agencies, including BayRisk, suggested that the insurance agency try a new method of data protection – an online backup and recovery service provided by LiveVault Corporation.

“When we signed up with LiveVault, we expected that it would be a redundant data protection method to our tape drives,” said Milroy. “But we immediately saw the benefits of LiveVault’s service, and it soon became clear that LiveVault would be our primary method of backing up our critical customer data.”

LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service works by automatically and continuously backing up business server data via a secure Internet connection and storing it in an offsite facility, where it is available for immediate recovery in the event of a system failure, virus, human error or other disaster. The service goes beyond traditional backup methods by operating on a continuous, as well as scheduled, basis. This means that BayRisk, by selecting the continuous backup option, can recover data up to the minute of the data-loss event, rather than up to the last time someone remembered to do a tape backup.

Server Backup and Guaranteed Recovery
The LiveVault service is designed for customers, such as BayRisk, whose servers reside outside of major data centers. These customers are often mid-sized businesses or enterprise remote or branch offices, who have primarily relied on in-house tape backups to keep their data safe. Industry analysts estimate nearly 50 percent of tape-based backups for these distributed servers fail to fully recover, which exposes these businesses to significant risk. Conversely, LiveVault guarantees recovery of all business-critical data and assures that companies will return to the state of their business prior to a data-loss event.

Milroy says that the three main benefits of LiveVault’s service are:

1. It protects the agency’s data on a continuous basis, and even backs up the changes in open files so that the company can restore information created seconds before a data loss.
2. The process is automatic, so there is no chance for human error.
3. BayRisk’s data is automatically taken offsite, so that in the event of a major earthquake, fire or other physical disaster, all of their data is safely, and immediately, off the premises.

The restore process for BayRisk is now much easier than retrieving a tape from its offsite location, loading it up and waiting for it to restore. BayRisk is now able to go online from any Web connection, log on to the MyLiveVaultä and initiate a restore at the click of a button. Within minutes, critical files can be restored to the company’s server. Also, in the event of a physical disaster that destroys the company server, LiveVault is able to perform a redirected restore, in which the data is restored to a server at another location. This degree of sophistication is a huge relief for BayRisk.

“We see the consequences every day of businesses that fail to prepare themselves for disaster,” said Milroy. “In addition to acquiring property and personal insurance, businesses also need a form of ‘data insurance.’ LiveVault provides us with this insurance, by continuously backing up our data, automatically taking it offsite, and making it immediately available for restore. With LiveVault, I know that if anything were to ever happen to our customer server, all of our critical data would still be intact.”