Ameritas Life Insurance Replacing Legacy Backup With Veeam Availability Suite

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Ameritas Life Insurance Corp., a major US-based life insurance, benefits and financial services company, has replaced its legacy backup system with its Availability Suite to ensure that the data and applications that its analysts, sales representatives, investors, business partners and customers need are always-on and always available.

By replacing an unreliable and cumbersome legacy system that failed to consistently capture incremental backups on critical systems with Veeam’s Availability solution, Ameritas has eliminated $100,000 of inefficient operations per year and can instantly recover every backup.

Ameritas’ IT environment supports 2,500 employees who rely on data to serve more than 3.2 million customers. If data is unavailable, actuarial teams cannot hit their deadlines to determine risk, sales and marketing cannot conduct analyses to uncover potential new business, and investors are unable to take timely advantage of market movements. In short, without Always-On data availability, Ameritas loses customers and misses opportunities.

“To us, data is like power: when we need it, we expect it to be there, always-on,” said Jeff Martinson, director of IT, Ameritas. “We have become highly virtualized over the last three years, and were looking for a solution to replace antiquated technology that was missing nightly incremental backups on critical systems. We would send restore requests and find out the backup hadn’t captured recent file changes overnight. Reliability was very shaky and, on top of that, getting support to resolve those issues was very challenging. Veeam’s reputation for reliability, excellent support and simplicity was what caught our attention.“

Availability Suite combines backup, restore, and replication capabilities of Backup & Replication with the monitoring, reporting and capacity planning functionality of Veeam ONE. The solution gives Ameritas what it needs to ensure Availability for all workloads and deliver the uninterrupted digital life experience that users expect.

“Veeam is reliable and easy-to-use, plus the support has exceeded the great things we heard before choosing the solution,” Martinson added. “Veeam has helped us save time, not just from a deployment aspect, but also for daily management and administration of the product. We documented that our legacy backup product required an entire full-time employee just to resolve issues. With Veeam, we have reallocated the resources that managed the legacy backup to more innovative roles in architecture and automation. And from a pure money-out-the-door perspective, we’re saving about $100,000 each year.“

Ameritas has also improved its DR capabilities. It has a NetApp environment, and, with the combination of NetApp FlexMirror and Veeam’s Built-in WAN acceleration, has the performance and efficiency required to send backups to a secondary data center 1,000 miles away. With Veeam’s SureBackup capability, Ameritas can rest assured that every backup is automatically tested for recoverability, so when a user inadvertently deletes an important file or data is corrupted, there will be no unpleasant surprises when there is a request to restore.

“In the insurance, benefits and financial services sector, data availability can mean the difference between winning and losing a customer, between a profit and a loss,” said Danny Allan, VP of product strategy, Veeam. “Veeam provides Ameritas with an easy-to-use system that’s reliable, ensuring Ameritas is always-on, and it’s all backed up by our world-class support team, which is second to none. There’s no room for error in Ameritas’ business, and it’s gratifying to deliver the Availability they require to provide the high level of service their customers demand.“