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Panana City-based Peoples First Community Bank knows what it takes to provide friendly, one-on-one service to its residential account holders surrounding its 33 branches throughout the state. The company also knows the cost in providing hometown friendliness on the front-end while still offering the benefits of an enterprise-quality IT infrastructure on the back-end.
According to Mike Young, the bank’s director of technology and vice president of IT, some recent, external events caused the bank to focus more closely on whether or not it could improve on its own backup and recovery of customer data.
With its headquarters in the Florida Panhandle, the bank has learned a thing or two about preparing for potential hurricanes. The term “headache” quickly comes to mind as Young recounts the effort he and his backup team took prior to an impending hurricane. “We just really struggled with our backup tapes—from their storage to their movement to disaster recovery—all were big issues for us that became a real burden,” he said. This burden was only exacerbated prior to a hurricane. “We had to make sure all the tapes were good, that we had all the tape sets we needed at our remote DR facility, and that we had a machine over there to restore them, if necessary. It was a big headache.”
Hurricane-preparedness headaches were compounded by the tightening of government regulations regarding safe remote backup practices, and the ability to rapidly access bank data from a remote location. Such requirements pointed Young in the direction of disk-to-disk remote backup with EVault.
Goals
Young already had been investigating the merits of disk-based backup provided by companies like EVault. He knew it would simplify life considerably for him and his team. He also knew it would offer much better data protection and faster recovery of backup data—where needed—in the event Peoples First was hit by a local interruption or regional disaster.
But Young also knew that these reasons alone might not compel the bank’s technologically-savvy CEO to fund a new infrastructure. As it turned out, the tightening of federal guidelines helped make the case.
Besides its efforts to adhere to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the bank had also recently received stricter backup/recovery requirements from its regulatory agent, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). “The OTS was requiring us to have our data offsite and far enough away from our corporate center, yet still rapidly accessible.
That almost demanded for us to look at disk-to-disk backup,” said Young. “You can’t do that with tape without getting into having to make sure you are moving the tapes securely. Would you let couriers move your tapes? No, I wanted us to retain the chain of custody and control of that process.”
With these new requirements in place, Young took the case for i365 EVault Data Protection back to management. “I said, ‘Look, this is our customer data. If something bad happened and we lost the data or some tapes, the regulatory fines we’d have to pay would be miniscule compared to the cost in loss of customer confidence and the loss of customer accounts. People won’t keep their money in a bank they don’t think is safe.’” Young told the bank’s executives they could achieve many goals with a move to EVault:
- Improve compliance with OTS and other regulatory guidelines
- Bolster the bank’s offsite DR plans
- Enhance the security of backup data
- Improve productivity by enabling faster local and remote data restores
- Shorten and simplify disaster preparedness steps for IT
- Streamline backup operations by eliminating tape and employing a more automated disk-based process
Challenges
Young and his team had used many different devices to handle the bank’s backups over time—from large, terabyte tape magazines to optical jukeboxes. “They were all mechanical. All of them, at some point or another, failed,” he said. Not exactly a fan of tape-based backup, Young maintains this area is often akin to an Achilles heel in information security. “It’s just the biggest pain in Information Security,” he says. “From making sure the tapes are labeled and stored properly, fireproof, and that the temperature and humidity for them are right. It’s very hard, as the tape media degrades over time.”
When users deleted or accidentally overwrote a file, the process to go back in time to locate the correct tape, or set of tapes, was not pretty. “We had to look at the tape inventory first, see which tapes we needed, then send someone to our offsite storage to get them. Since it was 60 miles away, that took a couple hours. Then, it took that much longer to load and restore the data,” he said. If it was a file, it might take an extra hour or two to restore it. If it was a whole server, it could easily take another day to get it back online.
Once the OTS increased its scrutiny and regulatory requirements, it wasn’t long before Peoples First made the switch to EVault.
Solutions
Peoples First now uses an EVault DualVault configuration, with a local EVault Software online vault at its Panama City headquarters and another remote vault at its new disaster recovery facility 100 miles away. The difference, according to Young, has been amazing. “It’s just night and day. Like going from analog to digital or the telegraph to the telephone. Performing backups with EVault Software is miles and miles different from sending backups to tape. Anyone doing backup to tape right now will instantly understand what I mean,” he said.”
Young really appreciated the simplicity of the EVault Software. “I just liked how the system worked. The interface was so intuitive, almost anyone could do it. A couple of the other solutions we looked at were much more complicated and also stored the data on a Web site somewhere. I just liked the fact that EVault allowed us to store it ourselves without relying on someone else.”
Results
Now, instead of shuttling tapes to its remote site, the bank uses EVault Software to automatically copy all data backed up the previous night to the bank’s remote DR site. “We wanted a product that would give us disk-to-disk and a way we could back up and protect all our corporate servers while having a copy of all the data at both the corporate site and our DR site,” said Young.
Also important: EVault Software has substantially reduced his team’s backup and recovery operations time. “We’re saving man-days, not just man-hours, but man-days,” he said. “I used to have two people performing tape backups before. Now I’ve got one person doing it about five percent of their time.” Young is also pleased with the cost savings he’s since been able to enjoy with his move from tape to disk. He estimates EVault now saves the bank roughly $24,000 per year it used to spend on backup tapes.
With EVault Software, Peoples First slashed its DR test times by over 10 hours when remotely restoring a handful of critical servers. “Using EVault, the restore was a piece of cake. It was almost too easy. To restore the same data from tapes would have probably taken us 16 to 20 hours. We did it in about 3 to 4 hours with EVault. Now, we can restore files or folder in minutes, and a whole server in an hour or two,” he said.
The ease of encryption was also a plus. “We now encrypt all the data that goes on the vaults. It’s been really easy to do,” he said. “EVault lets you make a couple of clicks and define how strong the encryption level is that you want, and you’re done…. It just gives us a much more secure method of protecting our data, not to mention being easier for us to manage.”
He is so pleased with the bank’s EVault experiences, he now plans to expand its use to Peoples First’s operations center. He expects another EVault vault to be placed there, creating a faster, disk-based archive and retrieval function for older checking account data that currently resides on optical platters. As new branches come online or old tape systems at the bank’s current branches need refreshing, Young also expects to add those into his current EVault backup network as well.
And how do the bank’s executives view their experience with EVault? “Management now loves going to the Board of Directors and saying, ‘Look how safe our customers’ data is.’ For us, protecting our customers’ data is just as important as protecting their money,” he said. “EVault helps us do that.”
Now, instead of shuttling tapes to its remote site, the bank uses EVault InfoStage to automatically copy all data backed up the previous night to the bank's remote DR site. "We wanted a product that would give us disk-to-disk and a way we could back up and protect all our corporate servers while having a copy of all the data at both the corporate site and our DR site," said Young.
Also important: EVault InfoStage has substantially reduced his team's backup/recovery operations time. "We're saving man-days, not just man-hours, but man-days," he said. "I used to have two people performing tape backups before. Now I've got one person doing it about 5% of their time." Young is also pleased with the cost savings he's since been able to enjoy with his move from tape to disk. He estimates EVault now saves the bank roughly $24,000 per year it used to spend on backup tapes.
With EVault InfoStage, Peoples First slashed its DR test times by over 10 hours when remotely restoring a handful of critical servers. "Using EVault, the restore was a piece of cake. It was almost too easy. To restore the same data from an amount of tapes would have probably taken us 16 to 20 hours. We did in about 3 to 4 hours with EVault. Now, we can restore files or folder in minutes, and a whole server in an hour or two," he said.
The ease of encryption was also a plus. "We now encrypt all the data that goes on the vaults. It's been really easy to do," he said. "EVault lets you make a couple of clicks and define how strong the encryption level is that you want, and you're done. It just gives us a much more secure method of protecting our data, not to mention being easier for us to manage."
He is so pleased with the bank's EVault experiences, he now plans to expand its use to Peoples First's operations center. He expects another EVault vault to be placed there, creating a faster, disk-based archive and retrieval function for older checking account data that currently resides on optical platters. As new branches come online or old tape systems at the bank's current branches need refreshing, Young also expects to add those into his current EVault backup network as well.
And, how do the bank's executives view their experience with EVault? "Management now loves going to the Board of Directors and saying, 'Look how safe our customers' data is.' For us, protecting our customers' data is just as important as protecting their money," he said. "EVault helps us do that."
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