Business Challenges: Threat of prolonged system downtime; cumbersome testing process

In the financial industry, reputation is everything. And no bank understands that better than Tomah, Wis.-based Timberwood Bank, which has managed to uphold a stellar reputation for the past decade, thanks to an unwavering commitment to its customers. “Our customers are always top of mind for us,” said Brenda Meyer, information security officer at Timberwood Bank. “We want them to know that we are here for them, ready to help with their financial needs.”

Given this commitment, it’s not surprising that Timberwood Bank takes disaster recovery very seriously. But concerns about the bank’s aging servers prompted a closer look at its legacy DR solution, Symantec BackupExec, and the solution’s inability to ensure redundancy & business continuity during a disaster. “We simply can’t afford 48 to 72 hours of system downtime,” explained John Kenworthy, IT network administrator and building security officer at Timberwood Bank. “For example, in order to serve our customers, we have to be able process customer requests. If the system is down, there’s no way to serve our customers effectively. We can’t just tell our customers that they can’t be taken care of for a few days or longer. People don’t want to hear about ‘downtime.’ They count on us to get them the funds they need. Any system interruption would impact our ability to do that.”

Moreover, testing the system proved cumbersome, and left uncertainty as to whether the bank could truly get back up & running after a disaster. “With our legacy system, we were able to test just the bank’s data, not its entire system,” said Kenworthy. As a result, the bank could never be sure that its applications and systems could be restored after a disaster hit.