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Banking on an Email Archiving Solution from Mimosa |
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Once Great Florida Bank listed on the NASDAQ Global Market in December 2007, and as their rapid growth continued, the Bank committed to building a state-of-the-industry storage management infrastructure to effectively meet the needs of an expanding customer franchise and to comply fullywith all regulatory requirements. The bank’s management team also wanted to ensure business continuity and mitigate any risk of potential system outages and loss of data from hurricanes or other unexpected events. Effective management of email records to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations was also required.
“An additional challenge was to be compliant with SOX,” said Hugo Torres, Great Florida Bank’s Director of IT. “Our policy requires all the bank’s data and information to be securely maintained and email messages to be archived for five years.”
Since state and federal bank examiners regularly review commercial and consumer loan accounts to ensure proper compliance, adding an electronic document archive and eDiscovery system was critical for Great Florida Bank. Having a comprehensive and reliable eDiscovery archive solution enables the Bank to prepare for their annual regulatory examinations quickly and efficiently.
According to Torres, two years ago it was common for only a handful of bank examiners to review Great Florida Bank annually. Last year, the number of examiners reviewing the bank’s records greatly expanded. This has Torres bracing for even more bank examiners in 2009. "State and Federal bank regulatory agencies have increased their scrutiny of all banks since the financial crisis began last year. They are sending more examiners, spending more time during their reviews to ensure financial institutions are in compliance, and properly managing their business. This helps build and maintain consumer confidence that the banking industry, while currently experiencing significant challenges, is prepared to manage through this economic cycle.
Great Florida Bank became eDiscovery-ready while reducing email archiving and storage management costs by 50 percent with Mimosa NearPoint and Hitachi Data Systems SANs.
Great Florida Bank selected the Mimosa NearPoint advanced archiving solution to automatically index and manage email records and ensure compliance. The bank stores its electronic documents on two SANs from Hitachi Data Systems, which replicate the data to ensure disaster recovery. Not only has the new solution assured regulatory compliance, it also dramatically improved overall email management and reduced the size of its email mailboxes, which resulted in the reduction of storage management costs by 50 percent.
“Before Mimosa NearPoint, we were archiving email in local PST files,” said Torres. “When users moved from PC to PC, the PST files did not move automatically — they had to be managed manually. This process created frustrated users and lost PST files.”
Mimosa NearPoint, in combination with Hitachi SANs, has delivered the comprehensive archiving and eDiscovery functionality Great Florida Bank required. It has also improved the overall management of their email and archives while assuring complete protection from data loss in the event of a disaster, including Florida hurricanes. In addition, the Bank has realized significant costs savings from enhancing their mailbox storage management processes while still meeting corporate policies for data retention.
The Mimosa NearPoint archiving solution has rapidly delivered value to Great Florida Bank including:
Today, Great Florida Bank has the assurance that its archiving solution can address any necessary regulatory or legal requirements. In addition, the new solution has had a tremendous impact on the overall performance and efficiency of its email solution.
“Mimosa gave us a way to seamlessly reduce mailbox contents on Exchange after deployment said Torres. The result was reduced mailbox size and improved Exchange performance.”
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