Oklahoma insurer cuts disaster recovery to under an hour

Oklahoma Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance has expanded its disaster recovery and cloud connectivity work with 11:11 Systems. Tests restored critical systems in just under an hour.

The work centres on systems used for claims, policies and cheque processing, which the insurer wanted to keep available during severe weather and other disruptions. Operating across Oklahoma, a state often associated with tornado activity, it needed a stronger recovery model than basic replication.

Founded in 1946 and based in Oklahoma City, the insurer has offices in all 77 Oklahoma counties and serves more than 140,000 member families through a network of local agents. That footprint ties operational resilience closely to its ability to maintain service across the state when storms affect local infrastructure.

To support that effort, the company adopted 11:11 Disaster Recovery as a Service for Zerto, 11:11 Managed Recovery and 11:11 Managed Connectivity for AWS Direct Connect. Together, the services were intended to create what the companies described as a functional hot-site strategy, backed by regular testing and external support for both recovery and connectivity.

Tested recovery time came in well ahead of the insurer's original target of eight hours. The process also gave it clearer expectations about what would happen in an outage and when systems could be brought back online.

Weather risk

The project reflects a common pressure point for regional insurers, which need core systems to remain available when claims volumes can rise suddenly after major weather events. In Oklahoma Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance's case, the focus was on ensuring customer-facing and back-office functions could continue even if local connectivity or infrastructure were affected.

Lydia Kulman, Director of Information Systems at Oklahoma Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance, outlined the starting point for the project in a statement.

"When I joined OKFB, our executive leadership asked to see a disaster recovery plan (DRP). They wanted assurance that we were testing regularly, running comprehensive audits and that we knew exactly what we would do in case of a disaster," said Lydia Kulman, Director of Information Systems at Oklahoma Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance.

Her comments point to a broader shift in disaster recovery planning, from static documentation to repeatable tests tied to defined recovery objectives. For insurers and other regulated businesses, that often means demonstrating not only that systems are replicated, but that they can be restarted in a usable state within an agreed timeframe.

In this case, the insurer moved from a more limited replication approach to a managed recovery model. According to information released by the companies, that gave it a tested path to begin recovery even if its own facilities or local links were unavailable.

AWS link

The project also included a change in cloud connectivity after one of the insurer's technology suppliers altered its preferred connection model to AWS. Rather than build and manage the design itself, Oklahoma Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance used 11:11's managed connectivity service to establish a direct connection to the cloud platform.

That suggests the insurer was dealing not only with disaster recovery, but also with a broader infrastructure adjustment driven by third-party vendor requirements. For mid-sized regional organisations, such changes can add operational complexity when they overlap with resilience planning.

Managed disaster recovery and cloud connectivity services have become a larger part of the infrastructure market as companies try to reduce the burden on internal technology teams while improving documented recovery performance. Insurers in particular face pressure to show that core applications can withstand disruption, because service interruptions can affect claims handling when customers most need support.

Kulman said the result was a level of assurance she had not previously been able to provide to senior management.

"With 11:11 Systems, I can confidently guarantee those things and more," said Kulman.