The Oklahoma Municipal Assurance Group (OMAG) was formed in 1977 by cities and towns to provide life and health insurance coverage for their employees. From these humble beginnings with only two municipalities, OMAG has grown today to an organization that provides four different plans to 380 municipalities and 10,000 employees.

OMAG was experiencing high network downtime, and slow performance due to technical problems that were not being resolved by the previous computer consultants. The preoccupation with these problems prevented OMAG from achieving the productivity and automation a network should provide.

High Plains Digital was called in to review the system and implement a solution.

Upon initial review the cause of the slow performance and downtime was due to a combination of substandard hardware, improper configuration and several viruses throughout the network. Basic network/server maintenance had been neglected which was compounding the problems.

High Plains Digital engineers first acted to stabilize the existing network. Memory was added to the server, drives were defragmented, viruses were removed, and the configuration was overhauled. A sweep was made of the workstations where problems such as unreliable hardware, poor configuration/optimization, and virus infections were identified and addressed.

Prior to High Plains Digital’s involvement no consistent virus protection plan was in place. The server had no protection at all and workstations had a combination of products with several products often found on the same workstation. Virtually none of the installed virus protection software were receiving updates. High Plains Digital engineers implemented Symantec Corporate Edition Antivirus throughout the organization.

Testing of the backup system, a Travan based tape drive, found that backup/restore operations were unreliable. High Plains Digital engineers could not get a single tape to fully restore. A new DLT tape drive was installed along with Veritas Backup Exec.

With the network now stable, an analysis of performance and capacity was made. Based on the findings, two new servers were installed to host Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server. The original server performed file/print services and hosted the tape drive.

With most of the workstation being 3 to 5 years old, OMAG entered into a lease agreement with Dell which supplied brand new workstations every two years.

With the network now operating smoothly, High Plains Digital engineers performed an analysis of OMAG’s business processes and Automation needs. The end result of the analysis included: