Case Study: Lipscomb & Pitts

Lipscomb & Pitts Bolsters Security, Protection of Client Data via masterIT and EVault

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Located in the land of the Blues and Elvis’s Graceland, Memphis-based Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance has grown from a two-man office opened in 1954 to the largest privately-held insurance agency in the Mid-South. Now boasting over 100 employees and delivering insurance solutions from more than 150 carriers, Lipscomb & Pitts offers everything from commercial and personal insurance to life, health, and employee benefits.

In its early days, providing for the insurance needs of businesses and individuals was mostly a matter of trust, advice, and a solid customer-provider relationship. While gaining customer trust remains a paramount goal, to remain competitive Lipscomb & Pitts has adopted modern technologies that help them grow their business by keeping employees, partners, and clients satisfied. The company offers 24/7, Internet-based client services and contracts with a global outsourcer to process paperwork around the clock.

Lipscomb & Pitts was named “Best Insurance Agency” by readers of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal newspaper and a winner in Memphis Business Journal’s “Best Places to Work.” It was also honored as one of only six agencies in Tennessee selected as a “Best Practices” independent insurance agency by the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (IIABA).

Yet, despite such achievements, Chief Manager Johnny Pitts acknowledged one area where the company’s technology had room for improvement—the backup and recovery of customer data. “As we implemented best practices throughout the organization, we realized backing up data to tape and transporting it offsite may not be efficient in case of a widespread disaster. We felt that a new approach to managing our data was needed,” he acknowledged.

Goals
Pitts knew the firm was already doing a lot of things right, and had room to improve in the technology area. “Good companies take risks, great companies manage them. So we decided to better manage our data, which helped us reduce our risk in this area” said Pitts.

The company’s IT operations supported the day-to-day activities of its 100-plus employees, but the backup processes needed to be improved to reduce reliance on their sole IT resource. “We were not comfortable having one person responsible for all of our IT tasks, including data protection,” said Controller Mike Yates. When it came to backup, they also knew the process worked, but was not the most efficient way to do it.

This was one of the reasons they were intrigued by masterIT, a local IT managed services provider, which touts the benefits of outsourced services including managed backup and IT-as-a-Utility. masterIT offered comprehensive assessment of the risks and strengths in Lipscomb & Pitts’ current backup/recovery and IT operations, as well as enterprise-quality best practice recommendations. Their Virtual CIO management function—paired with its proactive management of the IT infrastructure—struck a chord with both Yates and Pitts.

In the specific area of backup and recovery, they hoped masterIT could help them:

• Achieve more proactive, comprehensive data protection and better IT growth planning
• Better secure and protect critical client data
• Reduce backup windows to better enable the company’s outsourced Chinese operations to process data in off-hours
• Establish an out-of-region, colocated data center
• Reduce reliance on manual backup/recovery processes

Challenges

Lipscomb & Pitts had been managing with tape-based backups for quite some time. Using what masterIT CEO Michael Drake described as a typical tape rotation schedule, the firm soon found itself running backup jobs that took over 24 hours and had begun to reduce productivity.

Over the years, Yates had investigated moving to faster, online backup services and establishing a colocated data center out of the area. But, he always found it cost prohibitive for a firm of their size. So, Lipscomb & Pitts continued with storing backup tapes offsite at the local bank.

masterIT’s assessment changed Lipscomb & Pitts’ assumptions about the cost of disk-based backup and colocation. Drake debunked their view that it was prohibitive, largely because disk prices had come down so much in recent years and fast, affordable Internet services had become widely available. He maintained that online backup was extremely viable for today’s small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

“In our TCO analysis, we show clients the money they’re spending on backup tapes, as well as what they’re spending to store that tape offsite. We also try to show them industry best practices,” said Drake. “In all cases, we recommend they move to an automated, remote disk-based backup solution—whether they do it with us or someone else. Data is so critical to an SMB. If the majority of SMBs lost that data, they’d be out of business in less than a year. With the price of disk coming down so much, the price point now just makes sense.”

Drake recommended disk-to-disk backup of the firm’s critical data. He also recommended a more robust local backup. In his opinion, EVault disk-based local and remote vaulting technology was an obvious fit for the company’s needs.

Pitts commented the company’s tape-based backups system hindered DR testing and planning. “The issue of how well we’d fare in a real disaster was a concern,” he said. He was more than ready to entertain masterIT’s recommendations to incorporate enterprise-class IT best practices into Lipscomb & Pitts’ current operations.

Solutions
In keeping with its reputation as an industry leader in identifying and adopting best practices, Lipscomb & Pitts decided to concentrate more fully on what it knows best: Helping clients. The company subsequently underwent a dramatic overhaul of its IT operations, moving from its internal IT configuration to a fully outsourced IT function, managed by masterIT as a suite of enterprise-class IT services. Those included both local and remote online backup and recovery through Evault. Performing everything from 24/7 remote monitoring and management of the company’s servers and routers to secured firewall protection and strategic IT growth and planning, masterIT now takes the load off Lipscomb & Pitts’ local personnel.

At Lipscomb & Pitts’ Memphis office, masterIT now oversees the operation of one local, disk-based backup “vault,” fueled by EVault InfoStage software. The services provider also manages the firm’s second, remote backup vault—this capability provided by EVault InfoStage DualVault—established at a colocated facility several states away. After buying back the requisite servers and infrastructure from Lipscomb & Pitts and upgrading hardware as needed, masterIT was responsible for moving the firm away from its prior tape-based reliance to a new paradigm that involves both EVault InfoStage and EVault InfoStage DualVault for automated, robust backup and recovery.

Although masterIT had experienced other “private labeled” online backup solutions from other vendors, it wasn’t until the company chose EVault that it became confident in its ability to provide what Drake terms “best-in-class” backup services to clients like Lipscomb & Pitts.

“There are a lot of trunk-slammers out there who profess to do all kinds of things, regarding remote backup and other areas. With some of the prior backup solutions we’d tried, restores used to be very difficult. They just gave us no confidence that a disaster would let us restore our data for clients in the way we were promoting our services,” said Drake. “We’d seen EVault before the company was acquired by Seagate. The acquisition just gave them more credibility. As EVault’s price per-gigabyte came down, it became more affordable for us to offer EVault services in the Memphis market. It wasn’t long before we sought out EVault as our ‘top-tier’ backup provider.”

Drake hasn’t looked back ever since. He is fully confident in masterIT’s ability to successfully backup and recover client data. According to masterIT Network Consultant Andrew Spottswood, EVault’s backup process is now largely automated at Lipscomb & Pitts. masterIT receives daily notification of the success or failure of the various backup jobs. masterIT also monitors the health of the related hardware components at the Lipscomb & Pitts offices. But admittedly, much of the backup process occurs seamlessly, multiple times a day, with little involvement from even masterIT. EVault InfoStage follows its predefined schedules, sending out notifications as needed.

Lipscomb & Pitts’ new IT operations and backup/recovery processes have been transformative. “We didn’t have a CIO before. We ran our IT as a committee. masterIT came in and gave us that overall strategic perspective to see where we needed to go in the next few years, not just the next few months. One of the areas was colocation and EVault,” said Pitts.

Results
Noting the ease of EVault’s implementation and the smoothness of subsequent operations, Yates now sees backup and recovery as a largely “non-touch issue,” which dramatically increases security of the firm’s important data, providing overall peace of mind. “It’s a great comfort knowing the data is going out every night, live-time, to a different region. And, the process with EVault and masterIT has been largely transparent to our staff. That’s the way I hope it stays. We literally don’t touch it. We’ve been with masterIT for about six months and the backups literally run themselves.”

Yates also notes a special benefit of EVault regarding the firm’s outsourced processing work. “We outsource some of our processing work to China. At the time we brought on masterIT and EVault, it was important that our data backups, our ongoing operations and our offsite outsourced folks could all coexist. EVault provided the ability for all three parties to operate together with no toes stepped on in the process,” he said.

“Lipscomb & Pitts is an advanced company in terms of out-tasking certain non-core services. These people needed to be able to work in the middle of the night for processing,” explained masterIT’s Drake. “We knew our work with EVault would help ensure the systems were up and running and not being slowed down in the middle of the night for backups.”

Yates and Pitts also like the fact that masterIT now performs a full test-restore of the company’s data every month. “Like most of our clients who buy an insurance policy, they buy trust and peace of mind and expect it to be there when they need it most. Here, we can actually practice the event with EVault and masterIT,” said Pitts. “After we started performing test restores with masterIT, I felt a great sense of relief. When I got the call that the data was now in Atlanta and being tested regularly for restores, it was quite a load off my mind.”

Yates attended a recent disaster recovery seminar with large enterprise companies discussing their sizable investments in DR which tended to include costly, robotized tape bunkers. “If you’re a Fortune 1000 company that might be fine. If you’re Lipscomb & Pitts that’s not fine. For a fraction of that cost, we’re better prepared,” he said.

What does the firm’s new backup and recovery process say to clients? Pitts is just as succinct: “It tells our clients we are practicing what we preach. We often advise clients to do certain things to protect their assets. In our case, one of our assets is our client data. It allows us to tell them we are serious about protecting their data.”

“There hasn’t been a recent earthquake in Memphis, but Katrina wasn’t supposed to happen in New Orleans, either. You still have to plan for the big event,” said Pitts. “If you lose your data, your business shuts down and you cannot serve your clients. There are not many areas in business where you can write a check to make a problem go away. This is one of them and our data is safe.”

Partner Profile

EVault Fuels Success for masterIT ’s Managed Services Model

Coming from enterprise IT organizations who invested in doing it right, the principals at Memphis-based masterIT had an early vision that has since become a reality: To offer a state-of-the-art network operations center and a set of enterprise-class managed IT services to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses.

masterIT has since been written up in national journals CRN, VAR Business, and USA Today, its services and clients profiled as examples of “doing IT right.” According to masterIT CEO J. Michael Drake, EVault is a critical engine that powers one of his firm’s core service offerings: masterSTORE, an automated disk-based local and remote backup service. Drawing on the reputation and solid technology behind EVault has been one component in masterIT’s ability to offer, and trademark, the term IT-as-a-Utility.

“We make no bones about the fact that our backup solution is an EVault solution,” said Drake, referring to discussions about online backup services he has with many of masterIT’s clients. Noting the ever-more-crowded backup services provider market, Drake fully believes masterIT’s choice to go with EVault has helped the firm compete squarely with other backup service providers, some of whom he refers to as “trunk slammers”—folks who are rich on promise, but can’t always deliver solid backup and recovery, especially when it’s most needed.

“We tell potential clients about the size of EVault, especially in top-tier installations and customer environments. The company’s credibility alone has always been there, and has increased since its acquisition by Seagate,” he said.