VIST Financial Corporation – Case Study

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Meeting 21st Century Storage Needs with Permabit Enterprise Archive™

VIST Financial Corporation (formerly Leesport Financial) is a diversified financial services company with divisions in banking, insurance, investment, and residential mortgages. With over 450 employees and hundreds of thousands of customers, the company generates over 2.5 million emails per month, along with customer-related digital documents. VIST must comply with numerous regulations, including the Check 21 Act, Sarbanes–Oxley, the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, SEC 17a–4, and NASD 3110.7. They turned to the Permabit Enterprise Archive™ to help them meet their storage and archiving needs, while saving costs.

Permabit Helps Comply with Industry Requirements

VIST has a growing need to archive increasing volumes and types of corporate data in response to new, and often changing, industry regulations related to corporate communications. As the majority of communications at VIST are conducted via email, they were looking for a long–term archiving solution to manage all email communications, which now total over 2.5 million messages every month.

To assure compliance with regulatory requirements, VIST needed a system that could scale to handle the increased volume of saved email messages. Additionally, they wanted a solution that would provide seamless user access to data and provide flexible administration controls over read/write definitions. Finally, the solution needed to be cost–effective and not stress the already tight IT storage budget.

The search was led by Jack McLaine, who directed the final selection process and deployment of the Permabit Enterprise Archive™ solution. McLaine looked at other solutions, including EMC point products, and discovered that Permabit Enterprise Archive™ met every requirement. Most importantly, Permabit was far more cost–effective and flexible, as it uses an open interface instead of a proprietary API–based architecture. He also liked that it didn’t require ancillary support technology, which saved budget dollars.

“We needed an archiving solution that could scale to meet our future needs. Currently, email volume is around 2.5 million messages each month, and it increases every day. Given our highly–regulated industry, these messages must be securely retained for varying timeframes, and provide seamless access to the data. Permabit has allowed me to meet all of these requirements while reducing storage costs,” explained Jack McLaine, VP/IT Manager, VIST Financial Corp.

Permabit initially delivered for VIST by providing:

• Immediate and flexible scalability for on–demand growth
• Write Once Read Many (WORM) feature ensures continued compliance with government regulations
• Replication of archived data to remote site for disaster recovery and governance purposes
• Rapid installation and seamless low–cost integration with the existing environment

Figure 1. Permabit Enterprise Archive was quickly integrated into VIST’s data environment to securely manage data for long term retenion as well as provide employees with immediate, easy access to data across 23 locations.   >> Click Here to Enlarge Image

Permabit Delivers Dramatic Storage Savings

McLaine soon saw that he could use Permabit Enterprise Archive to solve other storage–related challenges, especially after Leesport Financial became part of a much larger corporate entity, VIST Financial.

The Permabit solution is designed to intelligently and efficiently archive all types of static data. Thus, VIST was able to move the majority of its static data (˜75% of storage capacity) to the Permabit Enterprise Archive™, a high volume of which are large digitized document images related to customer accounts.

This allows McLaine to not only reduce his investment in expensive primary storage, but it allowed the archived images to be consolidated on Permabit’s scalable storage system so 100% of VIST staff at 23 different sites has seamless access to the archived images on a daily basis. Additionally, Permabit’s built–in deduplication feature reduces archived data by more than a third.

This provides several key benefits:

• Delivers substantial savings in storage costs

• Helps achieve VIST’s Green Technology initiatives

• Increases employee productivity while improving customer service and satisfaction

“Permabit’s ability to handle VIST’s email archiving and compliance needs were the original reasons I selected the their technology, but these aren’t the only challenges Permabit is now helping us to solve,” stated McLaine. “Now, 75% of our static data, including document images, are archived to the Permabit Enterprise Archive™, which has resulted in tremendous cost savings, and the ability to meet our green technology initiatives. Our staff has grown to rely on having instant, easy access to critical business documents to speed customer requests and improve service delivered.”

Permabit to Support Virtualization Plans

Storage savings and IT process efficiencies wll continue to multiply as McLaine implements a server virtualization strategy. As such implementations typically create high volumes of replica images, McLaine will rely on Permabit to keep storage costs down while aggressively consolidating the number of physical servers. He plans to use Permabit Enterprise Archive™ to save the high volumes of virtual server images, where Permabit’s built–in compression and deduplication functions will accommodate the storage needs.

Permabit Support Goes the Extra Mile

The world–class Permabit Customer Support team has worked with McLaine from day one to assure complete 100% satisfaction with the deployment and use across VIST.

“Permabit Support is fantastic! It goes well beyond the sale, which I can’t say about most companies. The entire support staff is proactive, and cares about how I can be successful supporting VIST’s infrastructure and increasing business productivity,” stated McLaine.

In Summary

Permabit Enterprise Archive™ has become an integral part of VIST’s enterprise architecture, helping them manage industry compliance requirements and improve employee access to customer documents, all while reducing storage costs.