Not-For-Profit Health Insurance Provider

Being able to access affordable, high quality healthcare is important for families everywhere. When someone’s health is at risk, the last thing that person should have to worry about is paying for medical bills. No one understands that better than this not-for-profit institution, which serves more than 3.5 million members in the U.S. Efficient processes are key in helping them connect individuals with high quality healthcare providers and comprehensive insurance plans.

One area that was inefficient and causing operational issues for the insurance provider was the system backup process. These backups were being performed manually, which created a tremendous burden on IT staff, as the process was time-consuming and prone to errors. New data volumes had to be incorporated manually to ensure that they were properly structured and included in subsequent backups. Even still, data volumes were often missing after running backups. This issue was compounded by the lack of a streamlined method of tracking and reporting.

To further increase the productivity of its employees and reduce costs, the health insurance provider also wanted to replace its current terminal emulator. The company needed a cost-effective solution that allowed their users to Telnet to the mainframe, offered virtual terminal (VT) capabilities for AIX and Linux connections, and provided a standard FTP client for all users.

Results

By deploying several Rocket OpenTech products, the provider was able to establish a more efficient backup process through automated procedures. This created an organized and error-free workflow with reduced IT overhead. Rocket DASD Backup Supervisor (DBS) also made adding new data volumes easy. It replaced the tedious manual process and automatically integrated volumes as needed. Tape/Copy was another OpenTech product that was implemented to improve efficiency. It was originally purchased by the provider to migrate from old to new and virtual tape media, but it is now routinely used for tracking tape usage and data contained on the tapes through Tape/Copy’s reporting capabilities. This structured and automated method of data management freed up valuable time for the IT staff so that they could focus on strategic tasks, rather than time-consuming manual data processes.

Rocket Terminal Emulator was also selected to replace the previous terminal emulator solution because it met the provider’s requirement to improve access to their system. This switch was also cost effective, as Rocket Terminal Emulator was easy to install and manage, thus reducing overhead and administrative costs.