Imagine Reinsurance Group Chooses Topio
November 10, 2004

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The Topio Data Protection Suite (TDPS) provides enterprise-wide data protection to ensure the rapid and comprehensive recovery of any application environment. The solution supports heterogeneous servers, storage and storage architectures.

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The Imagine Group, a specialist reinsurance writer, has chosen TDPS as the core of its global data protection strategy. The solution, which began installation in July 2004, enables data from Imagine’s production sites in London, New York, Dublin, Barbados and Bermuda to be safely replicated to a standalone secondary site near Dublin built around an IBM Storage Area Network. All data can be easily restored in moments, without the need for specialist personnel at each production site, or significant additional investment in hardware or software.

The Imagine Group processes business critical data from multiple global sites using a mix of different database servers, applications, and internal and external storage devices on a daily basis - however, few of these had in-house technical support. In looking for a data protection solution, Imagine therefore had three key concerns – to ensure that it could implement a solid data protection strategy to effectively protect its global operations worldwide; to minimize the need for significant new investment in IT equipment and personnel, as well as to keep ongoing cost of ownership low; and to ensure that, should any single site fail, data could be restored swiftly to enable its business to continue without interruption. In addition, the Group needed to ensure that it was fully FSA-compliant, with all of its data backed up remotely, yet easily accessible should any compliance queries arise.

The company's key criteria for choosing a data protection solution was to ensure that, should disaster strike, lost data and system downtime would be negligible. The Topio solution was chosen as it enables data to be replicated, stored, managed and recovered from a single location, without the need for extensive changes to the company’s existing server, storage or networking infrastructure. This not only saves in equipment costs, it also avoids the need to hire specialist IT support in each Imagine site around the globe.

Paul De Munnik, Imagine Group’s IT Director, commented: "We’re delighted with the Topio solution - we now know that all our data around the world is safe, no matter what happens. Should disaster happen, we can be back up and running in a matter of moments - and importantly, we have not had to change our existing IT infrastructure, or make significant investments in IT personnel at our many different sites. For a global business such as ours that operates on the basis of better balancing the risk shared between client and the (re)insurer, it makes sense for us to ensure that our own systems risk potential is also as balanced as possible. With the help of Topio, we have done just that."