Sompo Japan reduces data backup costs by 30% and protects vital operational data with Veeam

Japan’s insurance market is the third largest in the world by insurance premiums and is already well-served by leading companies like Sompo Japan. With competition heating up in the sector and many companies offering similar services at equally attractive rates, delivering excellent customer service is now the main competitive differentiator in the industry.

“Leveraging the latest technologies will help us adapt to the fast-changing insurance sector and deliver stellar services,” said Mr. Makoto Shindo, General Manager of IT Service Headquarters, Sompo Systems Incorporated (the strategic IT company of Sompo Holdings Inc.). “We aim to be more than just an insurer to our customers by providing a positive experience every time they interact with us.”

Sompo Japan’s insurance contract management system lies at the heart of its customer services: It supports insurance premium collections, accident logging and insurance payouts, among other core activities. To keep these daily operations running smoothly, employees at Sompo Japan require around-the-clock access to this application and the data within it. If the system experiences unplanned downtime, insurance payments to policy holders could potentially be delayed.

For many years, Sompo Japan protected its insurance contract management application in a private cloud environment. While this approach prevented unplanned downtime, it also generated significant IT infrastructure costs and created a barrier for future scalability. Moving this system to the cloud promised to deliver greater cost efficiency and enhance flexibility.

“By embracing Azure cloud solutions, we knew we could optimize IT budgets and accelerate innovation for our customer-facing services,” said Ms. Hisako Tanaka, Executive Officer, General Manager of IT Service Headquarters at Sompo Systems Incorporated. “We couldn’t allow for any business disruption as we embarked on our public cloud journey, so we set out to find a cloudready data protection solution that could support a seamless transition.”

After conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis of available options, Sompo Japan selected Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure to ensure around-the-clock availability for the systems powering its services and to reduce IT costs.

“One of the main reasons that we chose Veeam was because it offered the best total cost of ownership (TCO),” said Mr. Shindo. “We compared it to the Azure Backup service, and Veeam’s high data compression rate pushed it over the edge. Even taking into account licensing fees, we would spend so much less on disk usage with Veeam that we estimate it will reduce TCO by 30% over the next nine years.”

Today, the company depends on Veeam to automatically tier backups across Azure Blob Storage for long-term retention, enabling a high return on investment. Together, with the savings enabled by adopting public cloud services, Veeam contributes significantly to lower infrastructure costs. 

With help from Sompo Japan’s long-term partner Hitachi, Ltd., the company migrated 800 virtual machines supporting its business-critical contract management system to Microsoft Azure and backed them up using Veeam. For the first time, the environment is protected end to end.

“Previously, it was challenging to ensure comprehensive backups,” said Mr. Shindo. “Our contract management system includes lots of routine and nonroutine jobs that are carried out using a job scheduler. Using API integrations, we could set up straightforward link between Veeam and our the job scheduler, allowing us to automate backups for 100% of the environment.” 

Sompo Japan can now recover data faster and more reliably using Veeam. At the same time, the company can now take advantage of backup verification features built into the solution to ensure that core data is always fully protected.

“Veeam allows us to make changes to our environment with confidence,” said Mr. Shindo. “If there’s ever a problem, we can immediately roll back without users even noticing.” 

Looking ahead, Sompo Japan plans to extend its use of Veeam to support the company as it pursues its next Digital Transformation goals. In particular, Sompo Japan expects Veeam to play a key role in its cybersecurity strategy.

“Our data is growing all the time, and we know that Veeam will scale seamlessly to support us,” said Mr. Shindo. “With the risk of cyberattack increasing, Veeam is an indispensable countermeasure to ransomware. We also believe it will prove useful as a tool to migrate other on-premises servers to the cloud. Wherever Sompo Japan heads next, we’re bringing Veeam with us.”

• Reduces backup costs by 30%, freeing up more resources for IT innovation projects.
  “Compared to Azure Backup Services, we expect Veeam to deliver 30% TCO savings for data protection over nine years,” said Mr. Shindo. “It’s a compelling business case that allows us to provide more value to our customers.” 
• Prevents vendor lock-in and unifies backups for multi-cloud environments, helping the company to adapt easily to market changes.
  Sompo Japan can use Veeam to protect data across any cloud environment or a combination of many, which gives the company the freedom to make technology decisions that optimize customer service and operational efficiency.
• Minimizes business disruption from unplanned downtime by enabling rapid, reliable data recovery.
  “Our contracts management system can, in very rare circumstances, be damaged when rebooting on Azure,” said Mr. Shindo. “If there was no system backup, we’d have to rebuild it from scratch, which could take up to three weeks. With Veeam, it only takes a few minutes, so the difference is huge.”