Reference no: EM132493422
Question Read the following case study and answer the questions that follows.
Washington Trust Bank knew it faced challenges in the areas of IT data backup and recovery, enough so that it stood out as one of the key concerns for incoming senior vice president and chief information officer, Jim Brockett. "Our biggest challenge was having to manage huge amounts of data and not a lot of confidence in our ability to restore critical systems in a timely manner," he explains.
Given any disastrous event, the potential fallout from an extended period of downtime was an enormous risk to not only daily operations, but Washington Trust Bank's compliance with federal regulations. "When you're a bank," Brockett adds, "unless there is a regionally declared disaster, you're not allowed to be closed without facing severe fines."
IBM Business Partner IT-Lifeline, an outsourced data service provider, worked with bank IT engineers to map out its current data backup and recovery solution identifying its key issues the way. "Washington Trust Bank was experiencing a great deal of pain updating and maintaining their existing environment," explains Steve Tabacek, president and chief executive officer of IT-Lifeline.
The bank's IT staff acknowledged the growing complexity and expense faced in supporting their existing systems, built around VERITASTM Backup Exec, VERITAS NetBackup, and an assortment of servers, disk arrays and tape libraries. IT engineers referred to the daily chores of reviewing log files, shuffling tapes and troubleshooting data backup problems as a painful process. File restores and server crashes, which required bare metal recovery of systems were time consuming and technically challenging.
Knowing his company could provide a convincing backup and recovery alternative, Tabacek introduced IT-Lifeline services - built around IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager - to Washington Trust Bank. The benefits were quickly apparent to IT staff. Still, Washington Trust Bank only decided to move forward with the new solution once the executive team got onboard. The bank's executive staff knew that past trends could not continue, noting that every 18-24 months, IT investments mounted as the IT staff tried to keep the existing data backup and recovery environment viable. Newer IT investments were required to address growing data needs before the previous cycle of hardware and software upgrades were depreciated.
The IT-Lifeline solution offered the benefits of a Fortune 100 infrastructure, so the bank received the benefit of a high quality, scalable environment without the huge investment necessary for this level of performance. IT-Lifeline allowed Washington Trust Bank to create cost savings in other areas as well. "We basically outsourced a considerable component of what a lot of our technicians were working on," Brockett says. "Then we were able to deploy them on other, more important tasks." And while it is hard to quantify risk management activities, Brockett recognizes the savings associated with this new solution are undoubtedly significant.
"When you mitigate a big risk, you know there's a payback, even though it's not always easy to put numbers around it."
The IT-Lifeline solution also opened doors to new ways of using data, causing the bank to rethink some core business practices. "We went through all the technical complexities why our IBM-driven solution was better from a sheer data backup perspective," Tabacek explains, "but then we talked about the power of the product in its ability to help them manage not only their backup information - but all their information." As a database-driven product, Tivoli Storage Manager allows Washington Trust Bank to extract data and achieve a level of reporting previously unavailable. "We're using an end-to-end IBM solution," Tabacek explains.
"Hardware and software from IBM form a foundation that can be integrated with other extremely valuable IBM products," he says. "And this scalability of the environment also allows us, as a business, to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost."
The above extract was taken and modified from "Winning In Midmarket: 100 Software Success Stories." © IBM Corporation, 2006.
(Note:- Students should make use of resources from the above case study to answer the following questions, but could also make use of their applied knowledge from lecture notes discussed wherever required.)
a) State the problems faced by Washington Trust Bank.
b) Give details of the solution adopted by Washington Trust Bank to address
the problems you listed in (a) above.
c) Bank executive staff wanted to avoid rising cost of IT investments but yet chose to invest in IT-Lifeline solution. Discuss two valid reasons?
d) In what other ways, do you think IT-Lifeline helped Washington Trust Bank make more savings?
e) Describe giving appropriate reasons three business strategies that Washington Trust Bank was targeting when choosing the IT-Lifeline solution.