Case Study: Riggs, Counselman, Michaels & Downes (RCM&D) achieves secure, cost‑effective cloud backup and disaster recovery with NetApp AltaVault

Riggs, Counselman, Michaels & Downes Protecting Critical Customer Data in Any Situation

Riggs, Counselman, Michaels & Downes (RCM&D) is a Baltimore-based insurance advisory firm with a 125-year history that needed to protect sensitive policyholder and claims data while meeting SSAE‑16 and HIPAA requirements. Their tape-based backup process had become costly, slow, and risky—especially after a regional earthquake highlighted that onsite tape storage could be lost in a disaster—and backups were impacting production performance and consuming significant IT time.

RCM&D replaced tapes with NetApp AltaVault combined with NetApp SnapManager, SnapMirror, and Snapshot technologies, vaulting encrypted backups (with locally managed keys) to Amazon Glacier while caching recent data locally. The new approach enabled cross-continental disaster recovery, eliminated production impact from backups, and delivered major gains: more than 7x data reduction, backup times cut by 93%, a 52% reduction in data protection costs, and a 93% reduction in backup management time, while satisfying compliance and audit requirements.

RCM&D

Scott E. Berterman

Infrastructure Architect