TailorIT AG eases financial strains with reliable IT solutions

When an accident occurs in Switzerland, insured persons have to first pay for any damages themselves and then wait for reimbursement from the insurance provider. With reliable IT solutions, insurers can facilitate the process and nurture a trusting customer relationship. Because when insurance premiums are adjusted in the autumn each year, an average of two million Swiss residents decide to switch providers.

When weighing whether or not to change their insurance, customers don’t only consider the price though. They also look at how reliable and responsive the insurer is. For insurers that want to retain existing customers and attract new ones, stable IT performance and high availability are literally worth their weight in gold.

The Swiss service provider TailorIT AG helps companies like these offer their customers the best possible service. Typically, these companies are SMEs in the insurance, healthcare and construction industries, for which TailorIT provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and related offers. These include virtual data centers with customized private clouds, on-premise solutions with managed services as well as pure consulting.

The owner of TailorIT, Edwin Unternährer, applies high quality standards to his offers: genuine, tailor-made IT solutions that take the pressure off customers. In his professional life before TailorIT, Unternährer questioned the focus of IT service providers on selling products, without really solving their customers' problems.

The desire to work in a truly customer-oriented manner was his main motivation for founding TailorIT. From the outset, he relied on NetApp's tried-and-tested technology, as his company’s goal is 100% availability and maximum security for its customers' core applications.

When Swiss citizens file a claim with their insurance company, they want to quickly receive reimbursement for the amount they paid out of pocket. A failure or poor performance of an insurer's core application would mean that policy holders would be unable to report their claims or that these claims would be processed slowly. As a result, consumers would be left frustrated and stuck with the up-front costs.

Such scenarios involving slow core application performance and low cyber resilience are typical concerns and problems faced by TailorIT customers. One example is a Swiss insurer with 200,000 policy holders that had major problems with the availability and performance of its core application. It would have liked to carry out a disaster recovery test (DR test), but no one was sure whether the systems could be put back into operation afterwards.

With the desire to finally improve its IT situation, the insurance company brought TailorIT on board. Within six weeks, TailorIT migrated nearly 200 virtual servers to its own platform, which is based on NetApp’s MetroCluster. As a result, the problems with availability and performance were solved. In addition, the annual DR tests that have been carried out since then have run smoothly and without operational interruptions.

“We can say to our customers with 100% certainty: there is no data loss with us.”

– Edwin Unternährer, CEO and Owner, TailorIT AG,

Unternährer was already convinced by his very first encounter with NetApp technology, before TailorIT was founded. When he migrated a customer's database to NetApp, the performance was twice as fast after a few additional optimizations.

NetApp's excellent life cycle performance also makes TailorIT's work easier, as data migration runs so smoothly in the background, customers don't even notice it during operations.

The following NetApp solutions are currently in use at TailorIT:

• ONTAP: Easy-to-use NetApp storage operating system with browser view.
• AFF-A400 MetroCluster: Storage system for on-premises and cloud data management accelerates workloads with the latest NVMe/TCP and NVMe/FC technologies. Consistent file formats facilitate replication with hyperscalers and enable a cloud exit strategy.
• 3x AFF-C30, 2x AFF-A250, 2x AFF-A220: Scalable, efficient, secure and capacity-optimized all-flash storage for VDIs (virtual desktop infrastructure) and as backup for MetroCluster data.
• Flexpod: The redundant 100 gigabit connection from NetApp and UCS X – the biggest performance gain for the TailorIT data center.
• Backups, replications, snapshots: Help with system recovery after faulty updates. All data are backed up for several weeks, so rollback is still possible even after a long delay.
• Ransomware Protection: The quick fix for encryption attacks.

Unternährer sees two important areas for the future. First, a geopolitical situation with conflicts and decisions that could also disrupt or change digital supply chains. Second, increasing security and data protection requirements, e.g. to the ISO 27001 standard. In his opinion, both of these factors increase the need for private cloud services in one’s own region, partly also because short physical distances offer better performance when accessing specialist applications.

Another topic is containerization. NetApp Trident is already being used successfully by TailorIT customers and simplifies the provisioning of block storage in a Kubernetes cluster.

Looking ahead to its own plans, TailorIT wants to continue growing, remain lean and keep its promise of quality. To this end, Unternährer wants to recruit even more talented IT technicians who are committed to lifelong learning, so that his company can continue to help all its customers, regardless of the systems they use.

To support demanding customers on their path to an intelligent data infrastructure, TailorIT AG will continue to rely on the technical advantages of NetApp for its plans and offers.