Kaercher said Allianz's biggest challenges were around compliance with HIPAA regulations and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as well as encryption of customer information and disaster recovery.

Kaercher said 'the light bulb went off' for his company that things had to change in data management when, in 2003, data backups where taking 23 to 24 hours. Kaercher first sold business executives on the need to update the company's IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software. Then, on the physical infrastructure side, Kaercher's team standardized hardware and consolidated nine disparate storage-area networks (SAN) into two and replaced a Fibre Channel switch infrastructure from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. with centralized director-class switches from Cisco Systems Inc. Network-attached storage from Network Appliance Inc. was deployed as a 'second tier' for less critical data storage.

The IT team also developed a list of best practices for networks and storage.

Kaercher said standardizing systems and consolidating onto two SANs reduced the time needed for recovery of AS400 systems from 36 hours to six. 'It's not a terribly difficult effort to go through. It's just a matter of what level of commitment you want to make toward communicating what you provide to the business,' Kaercher said.