Compliance: Aligning IT and strategic goals

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• Compliance

Mark Vernon

Published: 27 May 2005 12:05 BST

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Take the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which lists provisions to protect consumers' personal financial information held by financial institutions. Mike Haske, vice-president of technology at BankAnnapolis explains how the bank addresses this regulation: "To ensure ongoing customer service and regulatory compliance, we replicate our loan and mortgage applications from our central server to two separate remote servers every night." The problem is that for a small operation, this can be an expensive and risky undertaking. BankAnnapolis has more than 160GB of data moving across its network at any one time, so replication, if done manually, would be very time-consuming — time that could be spent on improving other service areas. Further, should something go wrong during the replication process, the bank could be left with applications going down the next morning, compromising customer service.

However, BankAnnapolis deployed Veritas' Storage Replicator product to cut out this risk, and keep compliant. It copies only changed data from remote servers — located at each branch — to a central server at the bank's headquarters for backup and archiving. In so doing, it ensures that data is available in its most current state across the network without slowing down normal server operations.

According to Haske, this decrease in the amount of data travelling across the network means server performance doesn't suffer while critical data is being protected. This capability is critical for the bank because in reality, it performs eight scheduled replication jobs each day, combined with several real-time replications, making resource consumption a key consideration.

This win-win situation for BankAnnapolis means that they are able to meet regulatory requirements for maintaining data availability while continuing to improve their standards of customer service. In other words, the business goals of the bank are perfectly in line with its investment in technology. This kind of harmony makes the case that compliance is an important strategic goal in itself, and that IT is most valuable when fully engaged in the organisation's business strategies.

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