Forrester

Why Read This Report

Starting in 2004, health plan Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (Blue Cross) began to completely revamp its disaster recovery program. In just one year, Blue Cross eliminated $1.5 million in network costs by consolidating most of its network spending with one telecommunications vendor and invested the savings in a backup data center. This allowed Blue Cross to reduce its distributed systems recovery time objective (RTO) to four hours. The health plan attributes this success to focusing on physical network diversity instead of carrier diversity, taking advantage of its reseller's expertise, and melding Blue Cross, its telecommunications vendor, and reseller into a seamless team.