Logan Bank and Trust Switches to AppAssure

AppAssure Software announced that Logan Bank and Trust, a privately-owned and -operated community bank in Logan, WV, replaced Symantec Backup Exec
with AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software for virtual standby and off site data replication. Using Replay 4, the bank developed and implemented a backup and disaster recovery plan for branch
and main bank data security.

As Logan Bank & Trust’s Network Administrator Matthew
Bailey notes: "When he began as the bank’s first full-time IT staff, he was
asked to evaluate the backup and disaster recovery process and what
encryption was like for the bank. At the time, he remembers, the bank was using
Symantec’s Backup Exec with each of the bank’s six branches rotating among 10
tapes".

"What I discovered," says Bailey "is that no one checked the
backups to see if they were working correctly and no one had any idea what was
being backed up. Someone would just put in a tape."

After a 30-day
test period, Bailey found out the answers to the two questions he asked: (1)
the bank had only four out of 30 days of successful backups – a 15% success rate,
and (2) there was no encryption. Bailey had his work cut out for him.

"With our old solution, we were spending $3,600 on tape
replacements alone," says Bailey, "and if we needed redundant hardware or if
one broke, we’d have to pay for one to be overnighted to us. So management gave
me sole discretion to throw out the playbook and to get what we needed for the
bank. I got to design the whole backup and disaster recovery infrastructure and
process from the ground up."

After testing, Bailey chose AppAssure’s Replay 4 to
provide the foundation of Logan Bank & Trust’s backup and
disaster recovery plan.

"On a day-to-day basis, Replay’s reliability is key," says
Bailey. "It alerts me if there’s an issue and it doesn’t eat up my time in any
unnecessary way. With Backup Exec, I’d easily spend 10% of my time each week
making sure we got a good backup, which meant I couldn’t fix the teller machine
or deal with some other IT need. This translates into dollars because clients
would have to wait for their financial transactions and that made them
unhappy."

As Bailey says, the cohesive disaster recovery plan he
designed and implemented was put to the test when the hotel next door to Logan
Bank & Trust’s main branch suffered a severe fire last fall. The main
branch is essentially Logan Bank’s data center, so when the fire department
turned off power to the entire city block and wouldn’t let bank employees or
clients back into the bank for about two weeks, Bailey’s DR process kicked in.

"Most people think of DR as a hurricane or something huge,"
says Bailey. "It becomes huge if you’re not able to work, but fortunately with
Replay, we could."

With every branch’s data replicated back to main branch, and
also backed up locally along with everything on virtual recovery using VMware,
none of the bank’s data was lost. "We have a virtual copy of every server and
had the virtuals ready to go," says Bailey.

"If this would have happened before Replay, we probably
couldn’t have recovered," resumes Bailey. "This is the question I’d ask any bank right now: ‘What
would you do if your data center was without power for two weeks without
notice?’ or, ‘What would you do if you couldn’t physically be on premises for
two weeks?’"

As Bailey says, he knows what he’ll do because he’s done it and
Replay’s got him covered.