INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centers

Insurance company Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan meets growing data management needs with Cloudian Object Storage .

The switch to Cloudian has given Farm Bureau Insurance an easyto-manage , cost-effective data storage foundation that provides

When that vendor was acquired , Farm Bureau Insurance was informed that key features it required would no longer be updated or supported . As a result , the company began looking for an alternative solution .

“ Because of the sensitive nature of the data we handle , we were reticent to move to the public cloud ,” said Julie Ulrich , IT Systems Engineer , at Farm Bureau Insurance . “ However , we wanted an on-prem archive solution that would deliver cloud-like scalability , flexibility and ease of management and also integrate well with Rubrik .”

Dewpoint , a leading IT Services and value-added reseller in Michigan , recommended Cloudian ’ s HyperStore object storage to Ulrich , who found that it met all of Farm Bureau Insurance ’ s criteria , including being highly cost-effective .

The company deployed HyperStore in each of its two data centers and implementation was smooth .

HyperStore : Limitlessly scalable , highly cost effective and easy to manage

Farm Bureau Insurance has now been using HyperStore for a year , and it ’ s been a great solution .

“ The integration with Rubrik has been seamless and having Cloudian as the target has made archiving pretty effortless ,” said Ulrich . “ We recently got some new Rubrik nodes , and as I ’ ve been moving things over , I just set it to archive . I don ’ t have to check on it very much , and I receive notifications if something goes wrong .” cloud-like scalability and flexibility in its own data centers , behind the firewall and fully under its control .

Need for a better archive solution

Founded in 1949 , Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan provides farm insurance as well as standard home and auto insurance to its members . The company ’ s IT infrastructure is about 99 % VMwarebased , and it has approximately 2 PB of archive data , which it previously stored on an object storage system from another vendor .

As its data continues to grow , Farm Bureau

Insurance expects to add more Cloudian capacity . The company may also incorporate Cloudian ’ s S3 Object Lock , which provides data immutability to prevent cybercriminals from altering or deleting backup data , thereby enabling recovery of an unencrypted copy in the event of a ransomware attack , without having to pay ransom .

In addition , Farm Bureau Insurance is considering deploying container applications in the future , in which case HyperStore ’ s integration with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid will provide a strong storage foundation . p

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