DavidShield Group leads the way in smart insurance with help from Veeam

The business challenge

Many insurance companies don’t deliver what their customers seek: transparent policies and smooth, hassle-free interactions. Customers want easy access to information and timely answers to their questions. 

The DavidShield Group figured that out a long time ago. For more than 20 years, the company has led the way in smart insurance by developing high-end technology solutions and innovative customer-oriented services that make it easy for customers to access quality healthcare anytime and anywhere. The company’s self-service apps are a good example. They enable customers to obtain a wide range of medical services without having to submit traditional claim forms or wait for pre-approvals and reimbursements.

“The DavidShield Group is known for offering a fully digital and transparent customer experience that’s unlike any other in the industry,” said Yoni Maman, Vice President of Cyber and IT infrastructures. “That’s why protecting our customer relationship management (CRM) system is so critical. It’s a homegrown system that we’ve refined over the years to support and enhance the customer experience. It supports real-time claims processing and it’s tied to our call center and call reporting, making it the most important system in our IT environment. If our CRM system isn’t available, we can’t serve our customers at the level they’ve come to expect.” 

Veeam Availability Suite was deployed to protect the CRM system (and all of IT) before Maman and his colleague Yair Ventura, Infrastructure System Engineer, began working for the company. 

“Neither of us had used Veeam, but we had used many other solutions,” Maman said. “We were given the option to replace Veeam, so we reviewed it thoroughly to make sure it was a good fit for the business. It wasn’t a good fit—it was the best fit. Veeam is reliable, intuitive and affordable, so we not only kept it, but we also expanded our use by deploying Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.” 

The Veeam solution

Veeam protects the DavidShield Group’s IT systems so customers can access healthcare services anytime, anywhere. Veeam also strengthens the company’s business continuity strategy with replication during DR testing and supports compliance with regulations including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Israel’s Commissioner of Insurance.

Veeam backs up 90 TB across 200 virtual machines (VMs) from Dell EMC SC and VNX storage snapshots on-premises for local recovery and replicates off-premises for DR. Veeam also protects Office 365 data. The DavidShield Group is transitioning from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online, and Veeam eliminates the risk of losing total access and control of data. Veeam protects SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business too.

“A big benefit of using Veeam is having all of our backups in one place,” Ventura said. “It makes backup management fast and easy.” 

Having all backups in one place makes recovery fast and easy too. When a customer-service shared mailbox was corrupted before it was moved to the CRM system, Ventura used Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange to recover the mailbox from a recent backup.

“Some customer data had vanished because of corruption, so restoring that data was critical, and Veeam made it easy,” Ventura said. “Our CRM system is supported by Microsoft Active Directory and SQL Server, so it’s nice to know Veeam offers Explorers for them too.”

Each year the IT team conducts a manual DR drill to ensure all data can be restored in case of emergency. The drill is a key component of the company’s business continuity strategy, and it’s required by Israel’s Commissioner of Insurance for compliance. Veeam replicates VMs from the production site to the DR site to demonstrate compliance.

The DavidShield Group complies with the GDPR as well, including its “right to be forgotten” requirement. Veeam DataLabs Staged Restore helps with this requirement by ensuring sensitive personal data is removed from backups before they’re restored. Another helpful feature is Veeam DataLabs Secure Restore. It scans data with antivirus software before restoring it.

“Veeam offers a lot of great features, so one of the things I appreciate is the company contacting us to see if we’ve tried a new feature and if we’re happy with the way Veeam is performing,” Maman said. “It’s really helpful when vendors approach me about their initiatives, and Veeam does that well.”

The results

Protects IT so customers can access healthcare services anytime, anywhere
“Everything in our IT environment is backed up by Veeam,” Ventura said. “We expanded Veeam protection to Office 365 because we trust it.”

Strengthens the business continuity strategy with replication during DR testing
“Replication is an important part of DR testing, and using Veeam to replicate from Dell EMC storage snapshots is reliable and easy,” Maman said. “I’ve worked extensively with Dell EMC storage, and it’s never been this easy to replicate — or to back up and recover from. Veeam integrates well with it.” 

Supports compliance with the GDPR and Israel’s Commissioner of Insurance
“Customers have the right to request their personal data is deleted,” Maman said “Veeam makes it easy to pull that data from backups so we can meet regulatory requirements.”