IT Security and Compliance, Resource Management, Backup and Restore, and Email Management and Archiving

Executive Summary

Overview
AgFirst Farm Credit Bank is a regional funding and financial services cooperative serving 23 agricultural credit associations in the eastern United States. Indirectly, AgFirst serves 80,000, mostly rural and agricultural customers. The agricultural credit associations and their customers rely on AgFirst, based in Columbia, South Carolina, for a range of centralized information management services critical to their daily business.

Barriers
Beginning in the early 2000s, AgFirst’s growth presented a range of demands on the firm’s IT operations. Its different challenges broke across four basic areas. First, AgFirst was faced with a proliferation of IT compliance requirements that called for detailed, frequent reporting. As the environment grew more complex, the team identified a need for a comprehensive set of tools that would standardize and streamline the way administrators and help desk staff installed, deployed, inventoried, and maintained hardware and software assets. Second, multiple data backup-and-restore processes led to a fragmented approach—supporting various server platforms, storage devices, and operating systems—that were inefficient and costly. Third, for security management, AgFirst invested too much staff time managing vulnerabilities and too little time putting precautionary measures in place. The IT team recognized the value of 24×7 firewall monitoring and intrusion detection but had trouble addressing this need in a cost-effective manner. Finally, proliferation of email resulted in a critical need for a more organized process to collect, organize, and store email data. In addition to gaining efficiency, a solution would need to offer credit associations the flexibility in setting retention policies and managing legal discovery.

Solution
In order to address these business drivers and IT challenges, the AgFirst team embarked on a number of IT initiatives involving Symantec technologies and services. First, the team deployed Symantec Control Compliance Suite to automate report generation for monitoring regulatory compliance and IT policies while also providing an administrative portal for user and group configuration. Second, the team rolled out a series of Altiris resource-management solutions, including Client Management Suite, Deployment Solution, Carbon Copy Solution, and Inventory Solution, for installing desktop software, troubleshooting system issues remotely, and tracking assets. Third, the team consolidated backup and restore on Veritas NetBackup. Fourth, a long-time Symantec security customer, AgFirst turned to Symantec DeepSight Threat Management System for a more efficient response to network attacks and, more recently, to Symantec Managed Security Services for continuous security monitoring. Finally, the AgFirst team deployed Symantec Enterprise Vault for email archiving and e discovery. For many of these initiatives, the AgFirst team engaged Symantec Consulting Services for help.

Benefits
Leveraging different technologies and services from Symantec, AgFirst is estimated, based on assumptions, to realize tangible business value. A Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group pinpointed the following areas of business value:

• Data Backup Labor Cost Avoidance: $1,319,339 in labor cost avoidance from the centralization of the data backup operations from January 2005 to December 2009
• Backup and Restore Labor Productivity Gains: $462,802 in staff time spent managing and troubleshooting backups from January 2005 to December 2009
• Threat Management Labor Productivity Gains: $45,465 in vulnerability analysis and intelligence reporting for network security from March 2007 to December 2009
• Security Monitoring and Firewall Management Labor Productivity Gains: $426,859 in labor savings with Managed Security Services from June 2008 to December 2009
• Enhanced Desktop Application Management Labor Productivity Gains: $39,526 in streamlining issue resolution for end users by the help desk from November 2001 to December 2009
• Streamlined PC Management and Deployment Labor Productivity Gains: $283,209 in software package installation and re-installation from November 2001 to December 2009
• Compliance Reporting Labor Productivity Gains: $546,817 in more efficient management of compliance reporting from January 2002 to December 2009
• Reduced Storage Savings: $285,845 in data storage savings through compression and single-instance archiving from January 2007 to December 2009
• IT Help Desk Labor Productivity Gains: $6, 523 in cost savings by reducing IT time spent remediating mailbox-related issues from October 2007 through December 2009