Data Center Software Standardization, Security Management, and Messaging Management

Executive Summary

Overview
Fubon Financial Holding Company (Fubon Financial) was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. The first private insurance company in Taiwan, Fubon Financial was originally formed in 1961 as Cathay Insurance Company and was renamed Fubon Insurance Company. Its businesses today encompass a broad spectrum of financial and insurance services, including investment consulting, securities, banking, asset management, life insurance, securities financing and future sectors, as well as various bills and bonds sectors. Fubon Financial is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (stock code: 2881). In FY2008, Fubon Financial had $10.875 billion TWD ($332 million USD) in earnings.

In 2005, Fubon Financial launched “Project One,” a plan to restructure the company into six customer- oriented business groups, and the Fubon Financial IT leadership team embarked on driving a number of related next-generation IT initiatives. The objectives included lower costs, new services, improved quality of service, reduced risks, enhanced operational efficiencies, among others.

Barriers
The previous IT environment at Fubon Financial consisted of various silos that required proprietary software solutions. With Project One, the IT team sought to drive various operational efficiencies and lower costs while driving enhanced service delivery. Some of the key challenges the team faced included the following. First, with various server platforms and operating systems, the prior environment leveraged a number of different backup-and-recovery solutions. These were inefficient and moreover backups did not cover the entire data center environment. Second, with many business-critical applications and systems, the IT team required a common toolset that would promote high availability across multiple server platforms and operating systems. Third, with an ever-evolving threat landscape, the team sought a toolset that would allow consolidated monitoring and management of its entire security environment. Finally, a burgeoning volume of email spam and viruses were clogging email, impacting end-user productivity and consuming valuable IT resources.

The Solution
Starting in early 2004, the IT team embarked on a series of different standardization initiatives. The organizational realignment that took place with Project One provided the team with additional momentum that translated into additional IT projects. First, for security management, the team added Symantec Security Information Manager to Symantec Enterprise Security Manager. The combination provides them with the ability to monitor and manage security across the enterprise-wide environment. Second, the IT team augmented the company’s security posture for the data center as well as its IP-based ATMs using Symantec Critical System Protection. Third, for backup and recovery, the Fubon Financial team standardized on Veritas NetBackup for its Microsoft Windows-, UNIX-, and Linux-based systems. Fourth, for file system and volume management, the team implemented Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, initially for its Sun Solaris-based servers and then for its HP-UX- based servers. Fifth, in order to sustain high availability across their UNIX environment, the Fubon Financial team added Veritas Storage Foundation HA. Finally, for incoming and outgoing mail security, the team implemented Symantec Brightmail Gateway appliances. For many of these different solution deployments, the Fubon Financial team leveraged the assistance and support of Symantec Consulting Services and various Symantec partners.

Benefits
With the help of different Symantec technology solutions, the Fubon Financial team is achieving measurable business value. The Alchemy Solutions Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis of the different Symantec solutions deployed at Fubon Financial and quantified business value in the following areas:

• Security Management Labor Productivity Gains: $179,619 USD in labor savings from January 2007 through December 2009 due to improved identification of, and response to, security incidents
• Spam Reduction End-user Productivity Gains: $27,481,939 USD labor productivity gains from July 2005 through December 2009 from eliminating spam before it arrives in end-user mailboxes
• Spam Storage Savings: $232,490 USD in storage space savings through more effective spam email filtering eliminating need for storage
• Improved Data Backup Labor Cost Avoidance: $3,109,590 USD in labor cost avoid- ance from January 2004 through December 2009 due to standardized backup processes, higher backup success rates, and improved staff productivity
• Faster Server Re-imaging Labor Productivity Gains: $12,207 USD in labor productivity gains from July 2006 through December 2009 due to improved server re-imaging capabilities
• Storage-Related Labor Productivity Gains: $132,508 USD in labor productivity gains from October 2004 through December 2009 due to increased IT staff productivity related to storage systems

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