Case Studies

Moving forward with a trusted partner Over the years as an HPE customer, Ailstock has built relationships with the HPE client specialists and other team members who have supported the evolution of his infrastructure. Being given the opportunity to understand each proposed solution inside and out, Ailstock has come to trust and rely on the expertise of his HPE representatives. "I ask a lot of hard questions," he says. "HPE has always been very accommodating with all of my questions. And I know I can reach out if I need a resource, so I had that comfort level with the people who have helped us along our journey." Running parallel to insurance-related applications, such as policy and claims management systems and CRMs, HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery demonstrated early in the trial the ability to identify where Ailstock and his team were losing time and adding stress. Recovery processes that depended on specific IT team members to complete within a particular console could now be managed faster and by anyone on the team because on the cloud side, "it's just not that complicated." "If my admin accidentally deletes the wrong VM, it's no problem now to go in and recover it quickly. That data security component is the big value add for how we're using HPE today," shares Ailstock. Processes that otherwise took a day, or more, and left people from across the organization wondering if the data was available or secure, are a problem of the past. "HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery has simplified the protection of our on-premises VMware® VMs, and we don't have to spend a lot of time managing the backup infrastructure. A single cloud console manages all our backup and recovery operations, and the dashboard gives us a quick view of the protection status and the need to take actions to ensure protection," says Ailstock. Proactive solutions for the road ahead Ailstock and his small but mighty team continue to have many responsibilities as a utility service to the development of insurance policies and claims for Maryland drivers. But with newfound peace of mind for the recoverability and integrity of data with HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery, there's more room for exploring how IT can create an impact on the future of the organization. "We're constantly evaluating workloads and trying to figure out the next best thing for us," he says. "AI is at the forefront of everybody's mind. How is that going to affect our organization? How is that going to change jobs?" As Maryland Auto Insurance responds to shifts in the overarching insurance market, Ailstock has the time and resource capacity to look at automating functions to help meet the demand in policies and claims. Predictable billing allows for budgetary forecasting, an impactful benefit for a self-funded organization that puts any profits back into reducing premiums for drivers. "HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery provides space-efficient backups and has reduced our overall cost of backing up and protecting VM data," he says. "Because it's HPE to HPE, the deduplication and compression means I'm not paying a fortune for the actual data at rest. We really like that we only pay for what we need. This makes it quite easy for us to manage our budget while making sure we always have the storage space for critical data backups. And from a recovery perspective, I can get the whole VM back up if I need it. We are now light years ahead of where we were just five years ago."

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