A Case Study in IT Modernization
First United Bank & Trust is a community bank headquartered in Oakland, Maryland, with 25 branches located throughout Maryland and West Virginia. Back in 2010, the state of Information Technology (IT) at First United Bank & Trust was very similar to many other small to mid-size community banks. The IT department at First United Bank & Trust had to deal with a small staff – often supporting many different roles – as well as an aging infrastructure. This made it very challenging for First United’s IT team to support the needs of the growing business.
At this time, the bank had not yet embraced virtualization. They were also seeking more efficient and cost effective alternatives to their existing data protection and disaster recovery solutions. A great deal of IT’s time was being spent troubleshooting and simply trying to maintain the environment. It was at this time when Matt Growden, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, joined the bank. Matt brought with him years of experience in larger enterprise IT environments that enabled him to have a clear understanding of how IT and the business side of First United Bank & Trust are connected. He recognized the importance of modernizing the IT environment to help the business grow and adapt to the more IT-centric landscape that was occurring within the industry.
“My first step was to mature the infrastructure of the Data Center and our network. With First United being a smaller bank, I knew that we had limited resources and we needed help bridging the gap with newer, emerging technologies such as virtualization. We needed a partner who was able to help us identify what changes we needed to make as well as help with the implementation and seamless transition without negatively impacting the bank’s day to day business,” said Matt.
Having experience in the past working with CHI Corporation, Matt reached out and began discussions with Rob Oddo, Technology Consultant at CHI. Together, First United Bank and CHI developed a phased strategy to modernize the bank’s IT infrastructure over the next three years. The overall goals for the bank included the following:
- Consolidate as many servers as possible by implementing virtualization and shared storage
- Alleviate issues around backup and recovery by developing a comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery strategy
- Perform a complete network refresh and improve network security to better defend against advance threats
- Make all aspects of IT as efficient as possible
The first step was to perform a complete analysis of every server in the environment. CHI Corporation worked closely with the staff at the bank to identify the levels of severity for each server and classify each one based upon the importance to the business. In addition, CHI Corporation performed a thorough performance analysis along with a detailed inventory of each server. With this information, as well as taking future growth projections into consideration, CHI Corporation was able to make several recommendations to the bank which eventually helped them consolidate the majority of their IT infrastructure and streamline day to day tasks that previously over-burdened the IT staff.
“It’s critical to work very closely with the customer to fully understand their challenges and end goals before even considering making any recommendations. This takes commitment from us as well as the customer, and First United’s desire to support our engineers throughout this process allowed us to make fact-based recommendations that eventually led to the successful achievement of every one of their goals,” said Rob.
Upon completion of this phase, CHI Corporation helped First United Bank successfully consolidate the majority of their environment implementing VMware, migrating from all direct attached storage to a SAN, and establishing a more efficient disaster recovery strategy by leveraging replication between locations in Oakland, Maryland, and Martinsburg, West Virginia.
It did not take long for the bank to see immediate results. Not only did they see reductions in both power consumption and physical rack space, the bank was now able to successfully replicate all servers and recover in the event of a disaster which had been a significant challenge in the past. This migration also helped substantially reduce the time First United’s IT staff needed to spend troubleshooting and maintaining the environment and allowed them to instead focus more of their efforts in other critical areas of IT.
The partnership didn’t end there. Over the next few years, CHI Corporation helped First United Bank follow through the modernization plan performing a complete network refresh and advancing the bank’s network security posture by leveraging technologies from Extreme Networks and Palo Alto Networks. This gave the bank far greater visibility and control into network that was never possible in the past. This also put the bank in a much stronger position to protect against the advanced threats and zero day attacks that victimize many smaller banks.
“CHI constantly stays on top of the latest technology and continues to recommend emerging vendors who are doing things differently—faster, better, and more cost effective. They have a perfect track record for recommending vendors to First United with phenomenal results,” said Matt.
Most recently, CHI Corporation served as part of a remote staff augmentation to help First United Bank through what has been one of their busiest years to date. Working as an extension of their IT staff, CHI helped First United complete several projects this year, including:
- Upgrading VMware
- Exchange migration
- Migration from Barracuda to Office 365 for email filtering
“From an IT standpoint, First United Bank & Trust is much more advanced compared to many other community banks. The collective approach that CHI and First United utilized to modernize their infrastructure, along with technologies implemented, can certainly be a blueprint for other smaller and midsized organizations like First United Bank,” said Rob.
Today, the bank has the flexibility to meet expanding IT requirements at reduced operating costs.
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Technology Summary
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Solution Highlights
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