Meeting a financial institution's specific availability requirements

The challenge: First Citizens Bank required an advanced availability solution with specific budget and control requirements.

SunGard solution: A broad solution architecture that incorporates recovery, replication and consulting services under one roof, with a single point of contact.

"We need to ensure that our customers are connected to their money, no matter what," says Teresa McCauley, Vice-President and Business Continuity Manager for First Citizens Bank.

That's a marked difference from a generation ago, when banks satisfied their obligation to keep customers connected with their money by mailing out monthly statements. Today, either through telephone or Internet connections, customers demand almost instantaneous access to their accounts-around the clock-and this is the new minimum standard for banks.

First Citizens Bank, whose assets exceed $12 billion, goes through an annual process to evaluate the criticality of its banking systems and set priority levels for information availability.

"Our business units complete a short business impact analysis (BIA) and we compile the rankings," says McCauley. "We then present our findings to management for approval."

The bank's core systems- deposits and transactional systems-reside primarily on its zSeries mainframe. Supporting applications, such as online banking, reside on a host of servers in a distributed environment.

"These are the capabilities our customers care about," says McCauley. "People want our ATMs to be up. They want to be able to come in and make deposits and perform other basic banking transactions."

The bank needed to meet more than just its customers' expectations. "We had to meet our regulatory requirements," McCauley says, "as well as to do the right things to prepare for potential local and regional disruption events. We had to plan for a number of new scenarios in the wake of 9/11. We needed to develop an advanced availability solution that met specific control requirements within a set budget."

SunGard studied First Citizens Bank's requirements and developed a methodology tailored to those needs. The approach called for replicating data from the bank's Raleigh, NC, facility to a dedicated storage device in SunGard's facility. The transmissions would be made at different intervals, including real-time, depending on the data's criticality.

SunGard proposed a mirroring solution to send seven terabytes of data to the dedicated disc storage, and an imaging solution that would take a snapshot of the storage to make a redundant backup in case the primary backup became corrupted. In all, the solution incorporates a zSeries mainframe, RS/6000 and Intel-based servers, end-user positions, 3 890 item-processing machines, an OC-3 connection, telecommunications support, project management resources and monitoring services.

"We based our decision on access to an advanced availability architecture, the cost associated with that solution, and the partner's flexibility to work with us," McCauley recalls. "SunGard's infrastructure and connectivity made it possible to develop the solution we needed."

So far, the partnership is meeting McCauley's high expectations. "We've tested it and proved the concept," she says. "Our mainframe deposit system may be our most impressive capability. We've reduced the time it takes to recover our customer transactions by more than 80%, and eventually we expect to reduce that window by half. In the event First Citizens experiences a disruption, we'll be able to continue to provide financial services to our customers. SunGard provides an umbrella of services to ensure we'll stay connected to our customers and their financial requests, no matter what."

Working with SunGard has had a ripple effect. "Everybody's excited to see the progress we've made with the new methodology," says McCauley. "We work very hard to promote information availability and the need for it, and our new relationship with SunGard helps us do that.

"SunGard continues to show me they really care about us as a customer," McCauley says. "They want us to be successful, and they stand ready to offer potential solutions and provide best practices. They are a true partner to our organisation."