Freelancers CO-OP Story

Freelancers CO-OP Now Prepared
to Navigate Disasters

Racksquared provides a disaster recovery solution for valuable applications and data designed to deliver smooth sailing.

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The crew that navigates troubled companies…

When New Jersey domiciled insurance companies encounter stormy seas, state regulators step in and appoint an experienced management team to oversee and take the helm to steer operations to an ongoing viable company or dissolution.

The contracted management team assumes control of all operations of an insurance company being liquidated, operating in conformance with the court order and state regulatory authority and statutes. The management team is responsible for marshalling and protecting assets, the collection of debts owed, performance of contracts and effectively resolving claim assertions from claimants, vendors and other stakeholders.

“In this business, there’s a statutory order in which claims are processed, and a regulatory priority of distributing payments, if any,” said Mark Biegert, the organization’s Director of IT. “We pursue remedies and take action to maximize assets all in support of a potential distribution to stakeholders/claimants.”

The management team operates under the company name established when the declaration of insolvency is established by the court, i.e., Freelancers Consumer Operated and Oriented Program of New Jersey (in liquidation).

Charting a new course

Because insurance companies deal with highly sensitive personal and corporate data that requires security, the organization has always felt it was necessary to maintain its IBM iSeries system on-site. The primary system was backed up on-site to physical tape and its disaster recovery (DR) services provider supported nightly backups to an off-site facility. In the event of a disaster, the DR services provider would build and ship a replacement system within 72 hours. When the vendor ended this offering, Freelancers investigated alternative solutions and discovered Racksquared Data Centers.

Racksquared was able to develop a custom solution to meet its specific business needs. Racksquared leveraged Cybernetics to build virtual tape libraries (VTLs) — one on-site at Freelancers’ location and another at Racksquared. The VTLs are synched daily to keep the off-site data current.Freelancers also reserved IBM Power hardware to guarantee the availabilityof space for recovery. If a disaster strikes, Freelancers can call Racksquaredto build it a system and restore its data, all in less than 24 hours.

Having this solution in place is critical to Freelancers. “The applications on our IBMi are the heart of what we do,” said Mark. “They’re internally built, specialized applications that are not commercially available. If our IBMi isdown, our business comes to a standstill.”

As an appointed administrator for handling certain liquidation proceedings on behalf of New Jersey insurance regulators, the management team is entrusted with protecting its data. “We have claims data, we have financial information, we have health information,” said Mark. “We have to make sure we’re protecting the data.” For the health-related data, Freelancers requires a vendor that is HIPAA-certified. Racksquared met that requirement and also made sure the VTLs use encryption so all data is secure in transit.

Along with safeguarding Freelancers’ data, Racksquared protects its purse. As a small company charged with marshalling assets and budget restrictions, Freelancers didn’t need to pay for massive amounts of storage.

“We found many vendors require a minimum purchase of terabytes of storage space, which is far more than we need and too expensive,” said Mike Rydzewski, Manager of MIS Technical Services at Freelancers.

Racksquared was able to offer the smaller amount of space that the business needs and then bundle that with the VTL solution. This approach transforms the capital expense of hardware and software into a monthly operating expense — one fee that covers the disaster backup and recovery solution.

“We try to avoid CapEx as much as possible, so this is definitely a right-sized solution for us,” said Mike.

Making sure the solution is sea-worthy

With disaster recovery planning, solutions are often in place but go untested until there’s a problem. With Racksquared, Freelancers was able to test its solution, tweak the configuration and get exactly what the company needed.

For each leg of the journey, Racksquared offered its knowledge and expertise. During the testing process, Racksquared carefully outlined all the tasks involved in disaster recovery. Freelancers then added to this project plan to create a comprehensive playbook for the organization to use in the event of an actual disaster.