Crossroads Systems, one of the world’s top providers of robust data security and archiving solutions, reported today that Illinois-based financial holding powerhouse, Foresight Financial Group, Inc. ($891M in assets), is one of the largest ever to employ the company’s SPHiNX™, a data protection appliance designed to shield corporate, remote office, and data center’s from the threat posed to their vital information by disasters and similar loss scenarios.
CRDS has built up a track record of providing mid-range server/open system environment solutions like the one announced today, which screams competency to potential clients. Little wonder that a big dog like Foresight, which has 12 offices just in Winnebago and Stephenson counties (largest market share of deposits of any financial institution in the latter), has engaged the company for supporting their data centralization scheme, which serves a network of five of their community banks. Foresight’s centralized hub approach allows for a very cost effective means of assembling the infrastructure required by these banks to both maintain sensitive data and comply with FFIEC regulations.
This is a huge leap forward for Foresight’s antiquated backup methodology, which previously employed an IBM LTO-4 library and deployed replication handler, doing away with the fuss of time consuming physical library data retrieval. What used to take an entire day, and even then was not 100% accurate, is now resolved speedily via a virtualized environment that has round-the-clock uptime and allows for real-time access to backup data.
Senior Product Manager for CRDS, Glenn Haley, proudly boasted of the capacity of the SPHiNX virtual tape appliance to meet and even vastly exceed the kind of stringent compliance requirements needed for the mission-critical data of today’s top financial institutions. Seamless integration with the IBMi environment, as well as fully automated encryption/logging gives financial firms a powerful tool for ensuring they stay online, remain within compliance guidelines, and can perform backup/recovery tasks with both minimal time and cost.
CIO at Foresight, Aaron Patterson, noted how CRDS’s winning product was kicked up as a potential solution through word of mouth from their business partner NASI and how the seamless IBMi environment integration allowed the real-time internet banking operations at Foresight to continue unabated. Patterson, clearly pleased with the exceptionally smooth transition, spoke of how they had SPHiNX up and running in 30 minutes and reminded sector operators of the crucial importance of such a solution, even if they are already using some kind of system to system replication solution (a replicated database that has been corrupted is no good after all).
SPHiNX can easily automate remote backup and the virtual tape at the disaster recovery site provides immediate recovery options. This is the kind of robust solution you want when you are running several banks and dealing with security/compliance issues to boot.
For more information on Crossroads Systems, visit www.Crossroads.com
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