Microsoft Azure supports new Agger Sistemas insurance broker system

Since 1994 Agger Sistemas has been operating in a very specific field: it develops and markets a management and multi-calculation system for insurance brokers. Its more than 6,000 clients throughout Brazil benefit from solutions capable of managing various policyholder information such as proposals, policies, endorsements, commissions, claims tracking, as well as accessing insurance systems to obtain these documents in PDF and even expedite calculations of various insurance modalities, among other functions.

A complex system like this is accessed through a client installed on the broker’s machine, which searches the cloud-hosted database for information. "Our clients are insurance brokers and insurers," explains Agger General Manager Junior Saladino. "They use our system to manage their own customers. Our databases store customer data for our customers," he adds.

These SQL servers store about 10,000 databases that are virtually the life of each insured person served by the brokers using the Agger system. The Agger team does not mince words to explain the importance of keeping this data available to brokers while saving and copying into backups. "I would say it's the broker’s life! The broker does everything within the system and has trust in it to do so. Through the system, he sees all customer data: all the databases for contact details, emails, his policies, his vehicles, his life, health, pension insurance... Everything the customer has," he says.

The Agger system was hosted in a data center where everything was the responsibility of the IT team, from installing licenses for each application (operating systems, SQL databases, etc.) to maintaining the machines and, most importantly, the backup – a process that kept everyone up at night. "That required a lot of work from a lot of people," says Junior Saladino. "The number of customers increased, and the backup was getting slower and slower, the machine was crashing... We needed something more professional. We no longer wanted to be SQL administrators," he explains. 

Automatic cloud backup

Brasoftware was the Microsoft partner company responsible for planning the project and helping the Agger team migrate their system to Microsoft Azure in just three months without hindering operations.

The company then began to rely on resources that only the cloud platform could offer, making the IT team's daily lives even easier, as explained by Brasoftware's Cloud and Security Solutions Specialist, Guilherme Bezerra. "After migrating to Azure, Agger no longer has servers. All that time invested in ensuring availability and health of servers and operating systems was left behind. In the cloud, they rely on SQL platform service where they care only about what matters, customer data, and the development of their business."

What interested Saladino and his IT team most, in addition to having the freedom to only take care of the business, without having to worry about maintenance activities, was the issue of backing up SQL databases.

After seeing what Azure is capable of in this regard, the Agger General Manager could hardly believe it: "In the beginning, we said 'no, it's not possible.’ We did several tests to see if it was true. Azure backs up all the databases every 10 minutes and saves everything for 30 days. We were all concerned about this, especially the owners of the company," he comments, concluding: "Today I no longer have backup nightmares, I have dreams!"

The backup and storage capacity of its 10,000 databases is due to the "elastic pool,” an Azure feature that allows you to manage and scale multiple databases with varying and unpredictable demands – it is through multiple pools that Agger configures and performs the critical backups.

"We have 25 elastic pools, and in each, we put about 400 databases," explains Saladino. "As far as backup is concerned, pools were what caught the most attention. It's the Microsoft product we use the most," he concludes.