Business Continuity
Bank invests in business continuity
Fast-tracking planning and disaster recovery to keep pace with a merger was a challenge.
by David Cottingham
When two banks merge, a
primary area of concern is addressing the
"What if disaster strikes?" scenario.
Whether a potential disaster is natural or
man-made, a sound business-continuity and
disaster-recovery plan is important to the
bank, its regulators and its customers.
Newly merged NewBridge
Bank, a Greensboro, N.C.-based financial
services and banking company with more than
40 full-service banking offices in the
Piedmont Triad region, Virginia and the
Wilmington, N.C., area, wanted to take the
best business-continuity (BC) and
disaster-recovery (DR) strategies from each
of its merging banks in order to prepare for
the worst.
With almost 75 applications from both banks running in the merged bank, recapturing data lost at the point of failure was a paramount concern.
As a co-leader of
NewBridge's IT transition team, Richard
Balentine, then director of technology and
operations of Lexington State Bank, one of
the merged banks, began by looking at the
best way to do that while effectively
merging operations and providing for the
safety of NewBridge's people and assets.
What complicated the transition was the new
stature of NewBridge, which was effectively
doubled in size. This presented the bank
with more intense regulatory scrutiny and
business-continuity/disaster-recovery
requirements.
With almost 75
applications from both banks running in the
merged bank, recapturing data lost at the
point of failure was a paramount concern
until NewBridge could streamline and reduce
some of its critical application usage and
consolidate to meet its new business
objectives.
"We began the process by
looking at what we needed to support and
then based our DR strategy on our business
requirements," says Balentine. "For example,
FNB Financial (the second merged bank), with
its branches in North Carolina and in
Virginia, was more geographically dispersed,
while all of Lexington's branches were
within a 75-mile radius. Under the new bank,
one group needed to learn to think more
about the implications of distance, while
the other was further along with its
strategic DR planning."
An important step was to
conduct a gap analysis of where Lexington's
systems and processes overlapped with FNB
and where they were in comparison.
"That really helped us
define our project," says Balentine. "Based
on the documents we created, we could work
on minimizing NewBridge's risk-and-recovery
window. Since both banks used the same
application for image archiving, NewBridge
didn't have to convert this critical
application. That was a tremendous benefit
to get that aspect of a critical application
up and running quickly."
As part of the BC
process, NewBridge had to decide whether to
outsource its DR or bring it in-house. The
bank evaluated the cost and benefits and
decided to bring DR in-house, but move it
from Winston to Reidsville, N.C. The team
created a "hot" disaster-recovery site,
which included the infrastructure to support
10 critical applications that are ready to
function in the event of a disaster. At that
time, the group also upgraded and added to
its storage infrastructure, implemented a
new virtualized server infrastructure that
consolidated 60 servers down to 10, and
developed a new messaging infrastructure.
Based on its experience
with this project, Balentine says NewBridge
now has the architecture and the BC plan to
support the smooth acquisition of other
regional or community banks.
David Cottingham
Finally, NewBridge Bank's
disaster recovery has moved beyond simply
recovering data on a computer. Now, entire
business processes can be quickly restored
and recreated. NewBridge's new in-house DR
infrastructure supports DR processes that
address every specific situation, including
how work and information will flow from one
place to another or from department to
department.
David Cottingham is director, global
professional services, data center and storage solutions, for
Dimension Data,
Herndon, Va.
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