Allegany Insurance Group Chooses Iland and Veeam

iland Internet Solutions Corporation, a VMware-based provider for application hosting, data protection and DR services delivered on the iland Secure Cloud Platform, announced the Allegany Insurance Group is using its Secure Cloud DRaaS for Veeam to simplify the company’s DR plan, ensure business uptime and meet industry regulatory security and compliance requirements.

Allegany provides personal and commercial line insurance policies, including farm insurance, through a network of over 400 select independent agents in New York and Pennsylvania. Driven to be the go-to insurer for partner agents throughout the region, it leads with a commitment to automation, product selection and personal service.

Before turning to iland, Allegany’s BC strategy required an unnecessary amount of in-house heavy lifting, and the company had to operate a secondary data center with redundant hardware purely for DR purposes. As a small business operating in a relatively rural area, the company only had one choice when it came to Internet services which created additional challenges. The 100Mb/s fiber connection, although generally reliable, was responsible for keeping Allegany’s 2 locations connected and the business up and running. Its 2 offices were located only a couple of hours apart, meaning if an outage or disaster were to occur that impacted both regions, the company would be unable to failover and stay online.

Since Allegany already used Veeam for backup on premises, they sought a partner that could integrate into their existing Veeam solution, while simultaneously implementing DR in the cloud. Veeam and iland, the industry’s only five-time winner of Veeam’s Impact Cloud and Service Provider Partner award and recognized in DR, were a fit for these requirements.

“There were a number of big factors that led us to choose iland, including its ease of setup, competitive pricing and reputation as an industry leader,” said Benjamin Hewitt, SVP and CIO, Allegany. “Our chief goals were to reduce the need to host our own hardware and rely on our local Internet connection for redundancy across the business. Rather than carrying that burden ourselves, it just seemed much easier to address our issues by turning to a cloud provider like iland. iland allowed us to greatly simplify our DR strategy and save on expenses like redundant servers, fiber Internet and our secondary building. I haven’t quantified all of the savings, but it’s been significant.“

The steady rise in threats like ransomware, which has become the fastest growing type of cybercrime, impacting a new organization once every 11s, according to research by Cybersecurity Venture, was also front and center in Allegany’s decision-making process. As an insurance carrier regulated by the Department of Financial Services, cybersecurity is a priority for Allegany. Unplanned downtime can often result in irrecoverable, long-term damage to the company. Whether from cybercrime, hardware failure or natural disasters, the impact of a disaster event can often be felt for years in terms of revenue loss, customer churn or the inability to continue business operations.

“As a global cloud provider, we are focused on helping organizations in all types of industries take advantage of what cloud has to offer, while enabling them to focus on business innovation,” said Brian Ussher, president and co-founder, iland. “Security has been baked into our DNA from the start, and as internal and external threats continue to evolve, so does iland’s approach to protecting data. Allegany chose iland Secure DRaaS with Veeam to provide the security, replication and failover capabilities it needed to comply with state regulations and ensure its business is always online and protected.“

With iland Secure Cloud DRaaS for Veeam, the team was able to meet all of their business objectives and simplify the company’s DR plan. Allegany no longer had to rely on its fiber Internet connection or maintain its secondary data center, saving money and freeing them up to focus on more pertinent business initiatives.

iland provides security capabilities integrated with all services, and ready to adapt to ever-increasing security requirements. From secure public or private cloud (IaaS) to secure DR-as-a-Service and secure cloud Backup-as-a-Service which can include Insider protection to further protect organizations from internal rogue actors, iland is able to offer the solutions and support needed to protect company’s data.