Safepoint Insurance offers home and condo property insurance through a large network of independent agents. Safepoint provides homeowners with the highest-quality property insurance along with comprehensive coverage.
Director of IT Arodi Cruz has been with Safepoint Insurance for a decade, watching the company grow from six people to more than 200 employees. As Safepoint expanded, it needed to meet more state regulations required for insurance companies.
Cruz wanted to ensure that user access to its documents in Google Drive was being properly handled. But with more employees, came more files. As more people joined, the number of shared files got out of control, and access to those files needed to be monitored and secured.
“Running an insurance company, it’s all about documentation and document sharing, especially with Claims and Legal departments needing to share files externally,” Cruz explained.
Securing these documents was a priority for Cruz and his team, but their existing solutions fell short of offering a complete view of sharing issues and lacked the automated remediation features required for efficient access cleanup. Safepoint needed a more robust solution to secure its cloud document sharing.
That’s when Cruz—who was sifting through a list of tech vendors GitLab works with—stumbled upon Nira.
With Nira, tasks that would have taken multiple weeks for Cruz’s team to complete could be automated within an hour or less. The IT team no longer had to think about these sharing issues; Nira’s automation handled the tedious, heavy lifting for them.
According to Cruz, if the team hadn’t bought Nira, they would need to hire another IT person to manually solve this problem because the company is growing, and the core business of underwriting and processing claims is not slowing down.
With Nira, we're talking about weeks in time savings. Within an hour of learning about the capabilities, Nira’s automation was set up in seconds.Arodi Cruz,Director of IT
Effortless auditing and compliance
Nira strengthens Safepoint’s audits and ensures regulatory compliance across the board
Over the last 10 years, Cruz has seen the regulatory landscape for insurance companies change significantly. State auditors care more than ever before about a company’s cybersecurity measures.
Nira lets Safepoint thoroughly and efficiently comply with these regulations in Florida, as well as Louisiana and Texas, the other states where they operate.
Nira is powerful if we have an audit where we must prove certain data is not shared. We can demonstrate where our files are shared and the rules we have in place. It’s much easier to show an auditor that this is under control.Arodi Cruz,Director of IT
In the past year, according to Cruz, Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulations (OIR) has begun to enforce similar measures to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which gives consumers the right to know about the personal data a business collects about them and how it is used and shared.
As a result, auditors will ask Cruz and his team questions about how, if a customer requests their data, what is Safepoint’s process to supply it to them. This could require sharing a substantial folder of reports and inspections for larger claims cases, and the Safepoint team must ensure that those items are protected. Nira allows them to restrict access and prove to auditors that customer data is secure.
What was once a time-consuming process—with IT personnel scouring through Google Workspace to answer all the OIR’s questions—is now streamlined and simplified.
With Nira, the audit process is more productive and saves us money while meeting our regulator’s requirements, which gives me peace of mind.Arodi Cruz,Director of IT
Secure external sharing
Nira restricts external sharing of public links, personal accounts, and more
At times, Safepoint must share company files with external parties due to the nature of each department’s work. Nira helps regulate this process. Nira also restricts public links that could be accessible by anyone on the internet with the link.
Public links can be a problem because they create the possibility for confidential data to get into the wrong hands, and there’s no access trail of who saw the documents. With Nira, public link exposure is automatically regulated so Cruz and the team don’t have to worry about data being publicly accessed without their knowledge.
“Some internal employees need to use public links because it’s the easiest way to share when not everybody has Google Drive,” Cruz explained. “But, keeping track of them when 200 employees are sharing links every day is impossible. Nira cleans this up without much interaction from us, which is the best part.”
Nira also secures files that may have been shared with personal email accounts, a persistent problem for most companies that use cloud collaboration tools. Personal account access is one of the biggest data exfiltration risks a company faces—and one of the most hidden. Accidental creation of company documents using personal accounts happens frequently, especially in cases where employees or other third parties are using a personal profile instead of a company profile.
Using Nira, Cruz can easily find all personal accounts with access to company documents, identify risky scenarios, and then take the appropriate remediation actions to fix the issue. The overall impact of reducing external sharing goes back to the time-savings and peace of mind that Cruz stressed.
I don't need a dedicated IT person using most of their hours scouring what data is and isn't shared. I have peace of mind that Nira is taking care of it.Arodi Cruz,Director of IT
Automation made easy
Nira’s automations allow Safepoint’s Legal and Claims departments to keep their information secure
For Safepoint, Nira’s automation capabilities are a game changer. They enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and enable around-the-clock protection.
Safepoint’s Legal team must consistently share files with external parties, like outside legal firms. With Nira, Cruz set up automation rules so that within 90 days, Nira will restrict links that were shared externally that no longer need to be.
Automation also helps the company’s Claims department protect customer data and keep the company compliant with state regulations. Using Nira, Cruz can ensure that files are properly shared and access is removed within a specified timeframe.
“Automation is vital because it saves the team valuable time and leads to less stress overall,” Cruz explained. Rather than worrying or not taking a vacation because an incident might occur while team members are out, the team trusts that Nira’s automations are always working.
Automation is essential because if something happens on a holiday and somebody's doing shady stuff in the background, Nira stops them. The peace of mind is priceless.Arodi Cruz,Director of IT
Nira saves time and lends peace of mind
Safepoint relies on Nira to restrict the external sharing of sensitive information, stay compliant, and automate the enforcement of key security policies. Cruz especially recommends the tool thanks to Nira’s ability to lock down sharing and have all the data he needs in a well-laid-out dashboard.
Nira is all about access control and precise reporting. The fact that I can go to my report overview, look at a complete summary, and even make more granulated reports is a huge plus.Arodi Cruz,Director of IT
For Cruz and the team, Nira’s ability to “set it and forget it” through security automation has been a crucial factor in achieving their overarching security goals.
If I were to recommend Nira using only three words, they would be ‘peace of mind.’ Our ability to ‘trust but verify’ sharing has been exceptional with Nira.Arodi Cruz,Director of IT