Swiss Financial Institution PostFinance Chooses PoINT Software Archival Gateway

The Swiss financial institution PostFinance AG is protecting object-based data by automatically replicating it using the PoINT Archival Gateway from PoINT Software and Systems GmbH.

The gateway makes it possible to integrate tape as a cost-effective S3 storage class. With this scalable storage solution, the financial institution achieves additional data protection. Even better, all of this was accomplished without having to restructure the existing storage infrastructure.

PostFinance needed a way to better protect the rising volumes of data on its object storage systems. Specifically, it needed an independent copy of the data, to guard vs. malware and human error. Such a system needed to be as cost-efficient as possible, however.

In the end, it settled on automatic data replication with the Archival Gateway. This software-based object storage system saves large volumes of data on tape, enabling integration of this storage medium (which is available even when offline) via a standard S3 interface.

PostFinance has a Quantum i6 tape library at each of 2 independent locations. The Archival Gateway receives copies of the data from the existing HDD-based object storage system and saves them redundantly to both tape libraries. If access to the backup copies is needed, it is done via the S3 API. And the tape libraries’ storage capacity can be scaled up as needed.

Andreas Christen, technology and information center infrastructure data department, is satisfied with how PoINT’s software is now being used: “With the PoINT Archival Gateway, we are replicating our archive data on tape, improving our data security. In the first three months, we backed up around 20 million objects in this way. Thanks to the standard interface, we can easily integrate the PoINT Archival Gateway into our existing storage infrastructure. By using tape as an additional S3 storage class, we have been able to massively improve our security design.“

The PoINT Archival Gateway acts as a reliable data security solution. Now that it replicates object data to an offline storage medium, the company’s data is more secure than ever. There was no need to restructure its existing storage architecture, and the solution’s standard interface means employee workflows proceed in just the same way as before.

Case study: PostFinance AG achieves additional data protection with PoINT Archival Gateway