CASE STUDY
IIntroduction
With the fast-paced nature of the insurance
industry, data resilience and Business
Continuity are among the top priorities
for IT professionals. This development
brings storage and Disaster Recovery to the
forefront of their agenda.
Badger International is a company that
specialises in insurance and related services.
Founded in 1995, it currently employs over
1,200 staff members across South Africa and
Australia and insures over 180,000 clients
with premiums in excess of US$100 million.
Its success lies in establishing innovative
insurance entities and partnering with great
people who have excellent track records.
Badger International believes in building
partnerships that allow companies to reach
their full potential and grow successfully.
As a result, Badger International recognises
technology as an important business enabler
to provide the highest quality insurance
services to their customers.
The challenge
Badger International’s IT infrastructure is
distributed across three different sites within
South Africa and consists of more than 16
physical servers and approximately 100
virtual machines.
It is mission-critical for Badger International
to protect all data from any incident,
be it fire, water damage, power failure,
ransomware or others. Consequently, storage
management and data protection are of
strategic importance to them.
Two costly Storage Attached Network
(SAN) appliances from HP and Lenovo
were reaching full capacity and had to be
upgraded. George McKay, Group Head of
IT, started to look for a flexible, scalable,
efficient and sustainable storage solution
that would solve the equation of managing,
protecting and delivering around-the-clock
access to the ever growing amount of data
in a highly secured and cost-effective way.
The solution
Working in conjunction with their
service provider, Galix Security Solutions
(Pty) Ltd, and the local StorageCraft
distributor LOOPHOLD, Badger
International evaluated a number of
options before choosing the StorageCraft
OneXafe 4412 appliance, featuring scaleout
object-based NAS storage.
The primary use case for the OneXafe 4412
was to shift the secondary storage load from
the existing SANs, provide offsite replication
for compliance purposes and protect against
ransomware. As a result, the data is now
being replicated successfully between the
offices in Springs and George, as well as the
data centre in Rosebank, Johannesburg.
With so much business-critical data at stake
and as an insurance organisation, McKay has
naturally deployed an extensive prevention
security infrastructure.
In addition, OneXafe provides Badger
International the reassurance that its data
could easily be restored in case of data
loss. To protect the insurance provider
and their client data against ransomware,
OneXafe takes immutable snapshots every
90 seconds, so files can be easily recovered
should an attack ever be successful.
BADGER INTERNATIONAL RECOGNISES
TECHNOLOGY AS AN IMPORTANT
BUSINESS ENABLER TO PROVIDE
THE HIGHEST QUALITY INSURANCE
SERVICES TO THEIR CUSTOMERS.
Furthermore, Badger’s compliance auditors
asked them to store their data externally;
consequently, to meet this requirement,
replication of data became a priority.
Lastly, Badger International wanted to
deploy a storage solution that would
increase protection against ransomware
McKay said: “After considering various
options including upgrading the two
SANs, we chose StorageCraft OneXafe
4412 for its simplicity, scale-out
functionality, as well as replication and
ransomware protection capabilities.”
Results
After more than a year of using StorageCraft
OneXafe appliances, Badger International’s
IT team has a simplified, flexible and
protected secondary storage infrastructure.
The ease of deployment, use and
management allows the team to optimise
their workload and spend more time on
strategic projects, without having to worry
about their storage solution.
The unpredictable capacity requirements
for data, combined with the high standards
for availability and security, put a significant
amount of pressure on McKay and his team.
www.intelligentcio.com
INTELLIGENTCIO
51