Paradigm Insurance Marketing

Go virtual...

Paradigm Insurance Marketing has two dozen agents selling LTC insurance through brokers all over Southern California and Arizona, and a second office in Texas. They also have 5 in administration. They wanted to give up their physical offices, if they could figure out how to do it. They already had a number of their agents telecommuting, so they were already on their way. They didn’t know how to handle the “virtualization” of their servers and their records. They did know that it would save them a bunch of money.

Virtualization gone wild...

They had planned to gradually go virtual over the next 15 months, but a buyer for the Los Angeles office suddenly appeared, so all the plans went into overdrive. It was a good test. The buyer never consummated the deal, but we were able to have them ready to go within a 30 day window.

The plan included:

• Moving the entire IT infrastructure into a hosting site in nearby Agoura Hills. A half rack with two T1s was ordered. A high-reliability infrastructure was designed with redundancy in the local exchange carrier (LEC) bandwidth, the air conditioning, and the power. The communications infrastructure could also balloon its capacity when needed.
• One of the T1s was for the VoIP phone system. All of the agents have an extension in their home and all the administrators had the ability to answer an incoming call (no matter where they were).
• The other T1 terminated into our NetCare Managed Security System®. It was configured to provide virtual private network (VPN) access for a large number of users, as well as full statefull firewall functionality.
• On the LAN were a Microsoft Server 2003 file server for all of the records, and a NetCare Backup and Data Recovery® (BDR) server providing data backup to off-site locations in Phoenix and Baltimore. By using the NetCare BDR, all HIPPA and SOX data integrity and security regulations were met. Virtual backup for the file server was also handled by the NetCare BDR.
• The implementation was managed by DWP, and the systems were managed by DWP Technical Operations Center (TOC).
• Support for all the remote laptops was handled by DWP Help Desk, backed up by the DWP NOC. Software and configuration are handled remotely, with hardware maintenance is handled via mail.

So the plan was tested and verified, although the real test comes with actualization. Virtualization and support is handled readily by DWP Information Architects.