Related Feature: Insurers Prepare for the Worst by Strengthening Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

The narrator of a Jimmy Buffet song laments, "I don't know where I'm going to go when the volcano blows," no doubt reflecting the sentiments of countless humans over time awed by their natural surroundings. The business and IT professionals at regional P&C carrier Mutual of Enumclaw ($320 million in annual written premium) may be similarly awed, but they are much better prepared.

P&C carrier Mutual of Enumclaw’s headquarters in Enumclaw, Wash., are located less than 30 miles from Mount Rainier, one of the country’s largest active volcanoes.
P&C carrier Mutual of Enumclaw’s headquarters in Enumclaw, Wash., are located less than 30 miles from Mount Rainier, one of the country’s largest active volcanoes.
The insurer's Enumclaw, Wash., headquarters stand less than 30 miles from one of the country's largest active volcanoes, the 14,411-foot peak of Mount Rainier. While a volcanic eruption of catastrophic magnitude is highly unlikely to occur in the near future, seismic and eruptive events of lesser impact are well within the range of possibility, reports Doug Cassell, Mutual of Enumclaw's business continuity program manager. According to Cassell:

"We have chosen to be prepared for three more-likely scenarios, any of which could be adapted to use in a catastrophic event: No. 1, an event -- of any kind -- that takes out our main facility; No. 2, an event that takes out our technology and data center; and No. 3, an event that prevents employees from coming to the office, such as a pandemic or severe storm.

"If there were an eruption or earthquake due to Mount Rainier, short of a catastrophic event, one of the planning scenarios should be able to cover most situations in the short term. On the technology side, we have prepared for scenarios 1 and 2 above by creating a backup site at a remote location that is unlikely to be affected by the same event that takes us down. This site includes dedicated duplicate servers and networking equipment, as well as duplicate storage area network (SAN) and backup/restore capabilities powered by CommVault (Oceanport, N.J.). The Dell EqualLogic (Nashua, N.H.) SAN is fully replicated to the backup site and is currently updated via snapshot every 24 hours, with a full backup every weekend. Our business users have told us that this will be acceptable in terms of recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives, and the frequency of updates could easily be increased should business needs change. In addition, both copies of the SAN are backed up via disk-based backup systems with data deduplication from Exagrid (Westborough, Mass.). Our mainframe system is also backed up by linear tape-open (LTO) magnetic tapes, which are shipped off-site daily.

"Users will be able to connect to the backup site via virtual private network (VPN) connections, either from home or any other Internet connection. We are in the process of identifying alternate workspace locations for our employees -- both fixed and mobile -- that will be connected via satellite or land-based Internet connections to the backup site.

"Due to the fact that our distributed backup environment is built on company-owned equipment, we have the flexibility to test its functionality whenever we choose to do so. Our legacy mainframe backup solution is through SunGard [Wayne, Pa.], so we are limited in the time available to test. For this reason, our policy is to test the entire environment at least annually, and subsets of our distributed environment quarterly, or as needed due to technology changes, updates, etc."