Case Study: Faster Recovery and Growth

A case study about a leading, A-rated insurance company

By switching to Leapfrog’s DRaaS solution, our client not only met its DR goals but now has DR experts who have completed hundreds of recoveries are monitoring its IT environment. If there’s a disaster of any size and at any time, these experts will manage it quickly and with greatly reduced business impact, if any. The improved IT environment, in turn, has improved the company’s ability to leverage its IT for additional business opportunities.

Business Problem

An insurance company with 18,000 policyholders across the southeast experienced significant business growth that outpaced its disaster recovery (DR) solution. The board of directors and IT leadership recognized the company needed to transform its current infrastructure to reduce business risk, including brand reputation. They engaged Leapfrog to develop a distributive solution to do three things: improve business continuity, meet their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and scale to accommodate future growth.

“Like a lot of businesses, the company hadn’t invested in newer technology as it grew. As a result, its existing infrastructure and tools were jeopardizing its ability to recover from a disaster in time without facing significant loss. This created risk that needed to be addressed and managed.”

Emmett Hawkins, CTO, Leapfrog Services

Leapfrog Solution

Designed DR as a Service (DRaaS) for a distributive, cross-platform infrastructure for 200+ servers and a 25+ terabyte data footprint. Key design requirements included:

  • Minimizing data exposure
  • Reducing offsite replication cycle times
  • Increasing the company’s overall backup retention capabilities to meet future growth opportunities

Implemented a solution that provides rapid and secure data replication and recovery capabilities for underlying servers, data, network components, and core applications.

Manage the DRaaS solution on a daily basis and are accountable for ensuring data integrity, replication, and the instantaneous ability to meet recovery time and point objectives.

In addition, Leapfrog was able to complete the DRaaS deployment in under 30 days despite the high number of servers. The key was to lead an extensive vendor collaboration effort and to plan using Agile methodology.

With a reliable, image-based backup platform and new technology from Veeam, our client can now meet its RTO/RPO with less expensive tools. Leapfrog can restore its server identities, security configurations, applications, and data all at the same time, and end-users can start using protected virtual machines even before the system is finished restoring.

Business Results

The insurance company is now on a much better footing. The company can recover from a disaster or emergency in less than half the time with half the number of engineers. Its encrypted, secure DRaaS solution meets its RTO/RPO and compliance and governance requirements and can easily scale to accommodate growth. What’s more, the tools used to achieve these goals are less expensive than the tools the company was previously using.

Specific results include:

  • Reduced business risk by dramatically reducing recovery point exposure (shorten RPO)
  • Reduced overall IT footprint
  • Fewer number of vendors required to execute the DR solution
  • Reduced annual cost for IT infrastructure and vendors
  • Cut recovery-time capabilities from five or more days to under two days for the same budget