Insurance Company Moves Recovery From IBM To Online Tech

Michigan Millers Mutual Insurance Co., a provider of auto, homeowners, business, and agribusiness insurance, has improved its IT disaster recovery capabilities and backup recovery response time by moving from IBM to the SAS 70 certified data centers of Ann Arbor-based Online Tech Inc.

Over the last three years, Michigan Millers has gone through a complete data center redesign. While going through the process, the company determined that its existing IT disaster recovery plan was inadequate. Its IBM disaster recovery facility was too remote, had failed multiple recovery tests, and was slow to restore critical data from tape backup. Instead, Michigan Millers opted to partner with a SAS 70 data center provider to safely store customer data and provide an environment where they could restore critical systems quickly.

Lansing-based Michigan Millers has now virtualized 90 percent of its servers and has moved away from magnetic tape to electronic backup directly to Online Tech's data center.

By partnering with Online Tech, Michigan Millers enjoys access to SAS 70 certified data centers on different power grids with highly redundant cooling, network connections, and backup systems. In the event that its headquarters becomes compromised, Michigan Millers will resume operations from Online Tech's Tier III data center with data and applications ready to go.

Maria Jasinski, vice president of IT at Michigan Millers, said the company has benefited from Online Tech's technical expertise as well as the flexibility it offers. For example, Online Tech's technical team reviewed their disaster recovery site plan and made recommendations that provided cost savings and streamlined the project.

"One of the reasons we selected Online Tech was the flexibility to design a solution that kept the scope and costs in line with our needs," Jasinski said.

Added Katie Bye, Michigan Millers network systems manager: "I feel I can lean on Online Tech as much or as little as we need. Although Michigan Millers technical staff manages our environment within Online Tech's SAS 70 data center, I know if circumstances out of my control were to happen, Online Tech's technical team would be there to assist."

SAS-70 is a nationally recognized audit standard for evaluating the process and security control procedures across the data center that is required by Sarbanes-Oxley. The SAS-70 designation demonstrates that the data center has the proper controls and procedures around physical and network security, environmental controls, system availability and performance and confirms that those controls and procedures have been followed consistently over time.

Online Tech owns and manages secure and reliable multi-tenant data centers in Michigan. With a full range of colocation, managed dedicated server, and private cloud offerings, Online Tech's clients dramatically reduce their IT data center costs, operational risks and downtime. Industry leaders trust Online Tech's SAS 70 certified data centers to insure their servers are always on, always online, and always safe.

More at www.onlinetech.com or www.mimillers.com.

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