Global Insurance Company Implements Better Legacy Data Management
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About the Company
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A global insurance provider delivers home, auto, medical, and real estate insurance products. Founded in the early 20th century by officials for officials, the company has always had close links with the public service.
As of 2014, the company was the second largest auto and home insurance provider in France, with 3.4 million policy holders. The company is also part of an umbrella mutual insurance group that leverages the collective strength of major players in the insurance. This grouping allows for economies of scale and more weight in the discussions and negotiations for establishing insurance rates and benefits.
The Business Challenge
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As part of their human resources information services, the company sought to better manage the backlog of payroll accounting information in their systems. The extensive amount of digital storage space required to keep all the records in the active accounting system was becoming a drain on system performance as well as being quite costly on a per byte basis. However, the company still needed full access to the data to meet legal compliance standards.
After evaluating several archiving solutions, the company chose to work with Everteam to implement everteam.archive to address their application archiving needs.
The Everteam Solution
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Beginning in September 2013, Everteam solutions consultants helped the company implement a semi-automated archiving system that relieves stress on their production applications while maintaining full access to data with appropriate security and retention policies. The prototype solution was delivered to the company in November 2013. After extensive testing of the solution, the production instance went live in June 2014 with a licence supporting 1000 users.
Payroll records from multiple applications that are associated with the specific archiving data flow are exported from the production application in comma-separated value (.csv) format. These files are extremely large with hundreds of thousands of lines of data. The archiving process then converts these files to structured XML files and imported to everteam.archive.
In everteam.archive, the structured XML content is distributed into data tables that support full search of the content and application of intelligent data analytics, specific data can also be retrieved on demand, and in its original format if needed. The data is secure, meets full compliance requirements; company staff has the option to also apply retention rules to the data in the future. The original content then can be removed from the original application, thus freeing up storage space and allowing for better application performance.
Benefits Using everteam.archive
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The company realized immediate benefits upon full rollout of the production environment:
Security
The archiving process validates the data on secure servers. This helps ensure that not only is the data safe, it’s correct. If and when it needs to be retrieved, company staff has confidence in the accuracy of produced records.
Compliance
Application archiving meets all legal and best practices standards for retention, security, organization, and data access.
Lower Storage Costs
Moving data out of native applications into lower cost tiered storage environments is more cost effective than leaving the data in native applications. With a lower cost per byte and better searchability, moving the data is more efficient than leaving it alone.
Improved Analytics
The ability to apply Everteam’s advanced data analytics to the tables of structured data enables the company to not only store legacy data, but also use it as a knowledge source for future decision making. Intelligent analytics allows staff to evaluate the data in new and different ways, identify trends, and apply that knowledge to strategic decision making.
Scalability
As the business evolves, the company can add more types of flows to the archive process, and thus more tables to everteam.archive, further taking advantage of storage cost savings and leveraging its confidence in the archiving process.
Search
If anything, the company archived data is more accessible than it was in native applications. Consistent data tables and format in everteam.archive allows the data to be searched faster and smarter, and allows for connections to be made between data that originally was from different systems.
