Protect Your Agency Data Now

Here are some key points.

Understand what you must do to minimize disaster. For your agency, how would a disaster affect your carriers, your office locations, your employees and your clients? Gather a cross-functional teammanagement, CSRs, producers, computer or technology department and administratorsto identify what they consider to be the biggest liabilities. Devise some mock damaging events.

For example, what if a natural disaster left your office completely intact, but blocked access? Even going without voice mail can be extremely detrimental for some agencies. With your team, you can estimate the probability of each, the impact each would have on the groups represented in your team, and what actions in each situation you must take to mitigate the damage.

Practice. There are also many times where the plan design is fantastic, but execution is not addressed. The impact of almost any possible scenario has been evaluated, and strategies devised accordingly so that your clients, carriers, IT systems and employees would be virtually unaffected in these scenarios.

However, the plan is not practiced. And therefore, when disaster does strike, your business is as bad off as if there hadnt been a plan at all.

A common expression among experienced contingency planners is, "The plan is nothing, the planning is everything." It is recommended that you rehearse your contingency plans at least once a year, and more frequently if your agency has undergone recent changes, such as the addition of employees, a reorganization or a relocation.

Test your contingency plans. Just as devastating as not practicing your contingency plans is not testing them.

Just because you send customer data disks off-site does not guarantee integrity or recoverability of the information. Make sure your backup system is well maintained. Some technology vendors now are offering weekly data backups that can be retrieved and stored via an Internet connection, alleviating the need for scheduled pickup and shipments of tapes for off-site protection.

And because the information is stored off-site, you would have all of the data you had backed up even if your agency computers are destroyed.

ASPs can help. Speaking of off-site, another option is to use the services of an application service provider (ASP), again offered by several agency technology system providers. All of your office data is streamed over a high-speed line and stored at a secure data center. You access your data via the Internet.

ASPs offer the comfort of knowing the technology vendor is retrieving and storing the agencys critical database files. The key to this program is that your ASP maintains consistent retrieval and storage of your system data so that if you need to activate your recovery plan, the vendor is one step ahead and can react immediately.

The process to store or recover data from an ASP is simple. Data is encrypted and stored on a securely housed server for immediate recovery. In addition, if your site is inaccessible or there is damage to your facilities beyond repair, your provider should offer the benefit of getting your management system up and running on the ASP environment. The most current backup is restored, and you can then gain access to your database for as long as you need it.

Of course, you must be confident your data storage facility has its own backup plans. Ask lots of questions of your ASP provider.

Change happens. Your contingency plan development must be an evolving process. Advances in technology can drastically change how and what information is necessary to store. Are carrier forms now available online? Are you scanning claims and photos of covered properties? Progress sometimes calls for dramatic changes to your agencys contingency plans.

Increasingly, information will be viewed as a pivotal corporate asset. We must ensure recovery of that asset utilizing technology to retrieve files and databases that are so critical to our prospering as agents and brokers.

Sallie Knighten (salliek@isusac.com) is operations manager of ISU Francis-Pinney Insurance Services, based in Roseville, Calif. She is president of the Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based Applied Systems Client Network (ASCnet), the user group of Applied Systems technology.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, January 13, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.