Securing 16 years of claims archives

Florida Peninsula Insurance, serving more than 150,000 customers, struggled with expensive archive storage and no visibility into who could access its sensitive data. BrickStor SP gave the insurer real-time active defense, user-behavior analytics, and Transparent Data Movement to secure cloud archives — while reclaiming storage and cutting costs.

Industry

Insurance / Financial Services

Solution

BrickStor SP

150,000+

policyholders served

70%

storage capacity reclaimed on a 60 TB system

15 min

to learn the platform

62%

rise in insurance-sector ransomware (H1 2021)

“From my experience, it’s so simple to use. I’ve done NetApp administration and Dell EMC administration — they’re solid but convoluted and hard to learn. With BrickStor SP it literally took 15 minutes for me to understand how it operates. The partnership has worked out really well.”

Tom Herbert — Chief Technology Officer, Florida Peninsula Insurance

The Challenge

Cyberattacks on the insurance sector surged as providers digitized — a 62% increase in ransomware incidents in the first half of 2021, with average recovery and downtime costs climbing from $761,000 to $1.85 million. With vast volumes of personal data, Florida Peninsula was an attractive target.

The insurer also faced data sprawl: 16 years of claims archives — photos of losses, recorded statements — sitting on expensive storage with no good way to control who could access archived data, how much, or when. Managing multiple platforms and tiering data for archive was time-consuming, tedious, and costly.

The Solution

After consulting with RackTop, Florida Peninsula joined the Jumpstart program with a free 90-day subscription for two virtual BrickStor SP instances, using Transparent Data Movement (TDM) to secure its cloud archives. RackTop’s cyber-analyst team provided 24/7 onboarding and customized the solution — even updating code within a couple of days to support a requested data-locking capability.

Impressed during the trial, the company moved forward and purchased a second BrickStor SP license for a larger 400 TB system, with plans to consolidate its existing NetApp and Compellent systems into a single high-availability BrickStor SP cluster.

The Results

Real-time active defense to prevent ransomware and insider threats, with the ability to roll back exposed assets.
User-behavior auditing and analysis plus visibility into who could access archived data, how much, and when.
Transparent Data Movement restored 70% of capacity on the 60 TB system, offsetting archive demand and saving thousands annually.
Air-gap data protection, immutable snapshots and file indexing, and Amazon S3 replication for secured archives.
Compliance and record-retention aligned to insurance-industry requirements, with analytics based on historical data.

Capabilities Deployed

What BrickStor SP delivered

Active Defense for ransomware and insider threats

Transparent Data Movement (TDM) to secure cloud archives

User behavior auditing and analysis

Immutable snapshots and file indexing

Amazon S3 replication

Compatibility with existing hardware and systems

“From a ransomware perspective, you can’t always identify an unknown compromise until it’s too late. RackTop not only had the ability to alert us to ransomware threats, but also to roll back exposed assets.”

Tom Herbert — Chief Technology Officer, Florida Peninsula Insurance

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