Louisiana Bank Relies on IBM BCRS for Disaster Preparedness

February 9, 2010 Alex Woodie

Nobody but Mother Nature knows when the next major hurricane will strike the Gulf Coast. But if one thing is certain, it’s that organizations in the region that prepare for disaster, like St. Martin Bank and Trust Company–a bank with 11 locations in western Louisiana that subscribes to IBM‘s Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS)–have a much better chance of surviving than those that do not.

According to IBM’s announcement last week, St. Martin Bank and Trust has been using BCRS since 1990. The bank, which relies on IBM’s System i platform, recently acquired another bank in the area, so IBM commenced a full review of its disaster recovery readiness and continuity strategy to include the bank’s new facilities.

While the bank has grown, it still isn’t big enough to justify the construction or acquisition of a DR hot site, nor the purchase of a secondary System i server in case the primary server fails due to natural disaster or crazy Saints fans. As a result, St. Martin Bank will continue to subscribe to BCRS, which maintains a hot site data center in Boulder, Colorado.

In the event of a disaster, the bank can switch over to the Boulder hot site and have its applications back up and running in less than 24 hours, according to IBM. The bank’s employees–if they’re able to work in the event of a disaster–would be able to access the BCRS System i server through a VPN.

“Without the luxury of moving our data to another branch elsewhere in the U.S., the IBM solution has become vital to serving our customers,” Matt Simar, the bank’s vice president and IT manager, says in a press release. “IBM has taken the headache out of our system recovery. It works that well. We ship our tape to them. They restore the system. They bring the VPN up and we’re ready to go.”

Lots of medium sized companies are turning to BCRS, which is composed of more than 150 emergency hot site centers in 55 countries, along with 1,600 employees. BCRS boasts a 100 percent recovery rate among the 456 emergency events customers have reported since 1989, according to IBM.