PIB Group Consolidates Terabytes of Data from Dozens of Acquisitions

“My team loves Egnyte. They love the granularity, they love the control, and they love that it makes data migration so easy.” 

Jason Ozin

Group Information Security Officer • PIB Group

PIB Group (‘PIB’), an international insurance intermediary, has placed acquisitions at the heart of its growth strategy–and the company has been on a roll. “We’ve acquired over a hundred companies in seven years, including insurance brokers, underwriters, and firms in parallel industries,” says Jason Ozin, Group Information Security Officer at PIB Group

These acquisitions have made the company highly diversified, with insurance offerings spanning business, auto, home, and more. But it has also created challenges in centralising and managing all the data from acquired companies or leveraging this data with AI to help employees work more efficiently. Egnyte has been key to overcoming those challenges.

Challenge: Avoid Data Sprawl in the Wake of Multiple Acquisition

When PIB acquires a company, it also acquires the company’s data. That data might reside in any number of different file management systems, whether local servers or one of the many cloud platforms available on the market. This introduced a potential side effect of PIB’s acquisition strategy: data sprawl.

As a result, one of PIB’s first goals after it acquires a company is to migrate that company’s data from whatever platform it was previously using into a centralised repository. “We didn’t want to have all our subsidiaries’ data fragmented across all their legacy platforms,” Ozin explains. “We needed a way to migrate their data into a centralised system on our side, but without having to transfer everything via USB drives or take it to some specialist. Going through that process for every acquisition would have taken forever.”

Cracking the code on efficient migration was just step one–the company would then have to organise and refine the vast repository of data it had acquired so it would be feasible to navigate. After that, they would need to establish workflows enabling multiple stakeholders, from multiple acquired companies, to work on files without conflict. As Ozin says: “We have a lot of projects requiring a lot of teamwork, and we wanted to avoid a situation in which people were messaging each other and saying, ‘Can you get out of this document so I can get in?’”

Creating a centralised data repository of this kind required next-gen cloud technology. But this created another challenge: “There aren’t many truly forward-thinking cloud platforms serving the insurance industry, and as a result, people working in this industry are often somewhat cloud-naive,” says Ozin. “For us to introduce a cloud platform without friction, that platform would have to preserve people’s preferred way of working as much as possible.”

“For us to introduce a cloud platform without friction, that platform would have to preserve people’s preferred way of working as much as possible.”

Jason Ozin

Group Information Security Officer • PIB Group

Solution: Centralise, Secure, and Augment Data in Egnyte

As soon as PIB made the decision to pursue an acquisition-focused strategy, they chose Egnyte as the cloud platform to facilitate the large-scale data migration this would require. Ozin points to several ways in which Egnyte proved the perfect cloud solution for addressing all the data management implications of PIB’s acquisitions:

• Data migration
  With Egnyte, PIB could migrate content from acquired companies’ legacy systems into a centralised repository in a few simple steps. “Egnyte provides tools that make data migration extremely easy,” Ozin says. “We can sync with SharePoint or OneDrive and pull files directly into Egnyte or use an appliance to pull data from a company’s local servers.”
• Organising large data volumes
  With so much data and headcount from acquired companies, it’s critical for PIB to be able to govern user behaviour and keep data volumes manageable. “Egnyte sends us alerts for unusual activity, which has helped us catch instances of people accessing files they shouldn’t access,” says Ozin. “And Egnyte’s cold storage option makes it easy to archive old, out-of-use files so we’re not wading through them to get to the files we need.”
• Secure sharing
  PIB frequently needs to share documents containing sensitive information with external stakeholders, including mainstay documents in the commercial insurance space like bordereaus. Egnyte makes it easy to do so securely. Ozin explains: “We’ll typically produce a bordereau in our MI platform, but then put it into an Egnyte folder so that we can share it with insurers via Egnyte’s secure links.”
• AI Automation
  An early adopter of AI for document insights, PIB is turning unstructured data managed in Egnyte into a virtual expert coworker, creating a more productive experience for employees. Dimitris Pertsinis, Head of Data for PIB Group, explains: "Egnyte helps us automate the process of gleaning insights from our data. We work with hundreds of insurers, each with their own Terms & Conditions. Now, our brokers can query across multiple documents in natural language to search for terms and conditions and compare files." Expedited data insights free up team members' time for client-facing activities.
• Easier co-editing
  Egnyte’s co-editing functionality made it easy for large and diverse groups of stakeholders to avoid conflicts over simultaneous file access. “Once people realised they could edit files at the same time, or even screenshare and work on files together, they were really pleased,” Ozin says.
• Familiar navigation
  With such frequent acquisitions, PIB spends a lot of time onboarding new users. Training new users in a technology platform significantly different from their legacy platform would extend onboarding times to an untenable degree. But as Ozin says: “With Egnyte, we can make their file store look exactly the same as it did in their previous employment. They’re effectively using the same G drive or H drive they’ve always had and can’t tell the difference.”

Benefits: Better Efficiency and Governance During Acquisitions

To date, PIB has migrated roughly 40 terabytes of data from acquired companies’ legacy systems into Egnyte. “Egnyte has become the centralised repository we needed for everything from business-as-usual content like Word and Excel files to insurance documents like policies, bordereaus, and claims,” explains Ozin. “And the migration process has been astonishingly easy. Doing the migration via Egnyte has probably saved us thousands of hours compared to most alternative methods.”

Some of those savings are likely attributable to Egnyte’s intuitive navigation, which has minimised the training and onboarding burden. Indeed, in combining the benefits of cloud storage with the familiarity of a traditional mapped file drive, Egnyte has cloud-enabled a user population that was previously, in large part, cloud-naive. “The fact that we can take data from a legacy system, migrate it to the cloud, and secure it without the end users realising anything has changed is a huge plus.”

Ozin’s next task is to ramp up his use of Egnyte’s archiving and sensitive content detection functionality to keep PIB’s content repository as organised and lean as possible. As an example, Ozin says, “We’ve just started running a purge of files that haven’t been touched in four or more years and archiving them. That alone could cut our file store almost in half, which will make it much easier to navigate and to zero in on high-priority sensitive content alerts.”

Neither Ozin nor anyone on his team has any doubt that Egnyte was the right choice to create a centralised, cloud-hosted content repository at PIB. “My team loves Egnyte,” Ozin says. “They love the granularity, they love the control, and they love that it makes data migration so easy. Egnyte is definitely up there with the best modern cloud applications.”