Background
Max Re (NASDAQ: MXRE) provides creative and competitive risk transfer solutions for clients in the property & casualty and life & annuity insurance markets. From offices in Bermuda and Dublin, they underwrite a large range of reinsurance and insurance transactions, with a focus on transactions with significant asset transfers and predictable liability cash flows.
With over $650US million in gross premiums written in 2002, reinsurer Max Re relies heavily on e-mail to communicate with its clients and offices worldwide. E-mail is vital to Max Re’s ability to collaborate between their Bermuda and Dublin offices on policies and documents and a loss of e-mail would constitute a highly disruptive and very costly problem for them. In 2002 over 35% of Max Re’s gross premiums were derived from non-US businesses and being able to keep in touch with them is vital to their business.
Situation
With the worst storm to threaten Bermuda in over 80 years bearing down on their head office in Hamilton, Bermuda, Max Re’s IT team was tasked with insuring that they would be able maintain e-mail continuity no matter what might happen when Hurricane Fabian hit.
Managing risk is an integral part of Max Re’s business and they knew how disruptive a loss of e-mail could be to their employees and customers. With only a couple of days remaining before the storm’s landfall, Max Re needed an e-mail continuity solution that could be implemented quickly and seamlessly into their existing technology architecture.
“Fabian came in at quite an inopportune moment,” Max Re Vice President of Technology Kevin Lohan, described to ComputerWorld Magazine (Sept. 10, 2003) in a story on the IT implications of Hurricane Fabian.
Ironically, Lohan noted that Max Re was in the process setting up a disaster recovery system in its Dublin offices for redundancy but still several months away from completing and implementing that top-to-bottom disaster recovery strategy. But even when that system is scheduled to be completed, the system will take 12 to 24 hours to get up and running in an emergency.
While other critical business systems can sometimes wait that long for use, e-mail has to be back up much faster so business can proceed, Lohan told Computerworld.
Solution
“When we received the early warning of a hurricane, we quickly turned to EAS. We were able to deploy EAS in less than an hour – well before the hurricane hit – protecting us from a potential business disaster,” said Lohan. “Even during the hurricane, having EAS ensured that we would be able to send and receive e-mail from our homes and other locations if our own systems went down.”
With only hours to go before the hurricane was due to strike the island, the support team got to work immediately with Max Re to set up EAS.
The entire installation itself took only 30 minutes to accomplish and the support team was on call to work with Max Re throughout the weekend insuring that their e-mail system was up and running.
When Hurricane Fabian finally struck, winds in excess of 120 MPH knocked out power to more than 25,000 homes and businesses and an estimated $125US million in damage was done to the island.
When Monday morning arrived and the worst of the storm had passed, it was business as usual at Max Re. “When you need it, EAS is invaluable,” said Lohan. “I certainly felt a lot more confident that even if the Bermuda office was not reachable, travelling executives and the remote office in Dublin would have appeared to be conducting business as usual.”
Take the Next Step
For Max Re, EAS represents the most affordable and effective solution, with continuous access to the company’s e-mail in the event of a primary messaging system disruption. EAS provides organisations with a highly affordable solution to ensure continuity of e-mail messaging in the event of an emergency or system failure. It’s designed to allow organisations to avert costly downtime, productivity and revenue losses while providing an easily managed, automated solution that serves as a life-line in times of system stress and any emergency.