SmartBank Opts for Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. has been chosen by SmartBank as its first in-house approach to data protection, providing customers with a convenient, secure and reliable banking experience while reducing operational costs and enhancing regulatory reporting.

SmartBank was in need of a robust backup solution that boosts customer satisfaction and trust, maintains compliance with regulatory obligations and keeps banking services running and recoverable after a disaster event.

Founded in 2007, it is a full-service commercial bank providing banking, investment, insurance and mortgage financial services, with 40 branches spanning Tennessee, Alabama and Florida. To provide customers with a banking experience, it focuses on hiring employees that will deliver client service and ensure that the IT infrastructure and applications powering its services are always available.

After many years of relying on costly third-party services that only offered limited visibility into the integrity and recoverability of their system backups, the company knew it needed a new solution. SmartBank sought a solution that was able to run, monitor and maintain its backup and recovery systems, while also providing granular reports on its backup environment to prevent regulatory compliance risks.

“Today, customers expect immediate access to their bank accounts and services across multiple digital channels -any unplanned downtime would have a significant impact on our reputation. As a result, preventing disruption to our services is one of our top priorities,” said Daniel Hereford, CIO, SmartBank. “We have a lean IT team, so we wanted a comprehensive backup and recovery solution that was intuitive and easy to operate. We are very impressed by how user-friendly the Veeam solutions are. The fact that Veeam runs on almost any hardware and is compatible with VMware was also a huge plus, as this helps us to avoid vendor lock-in and simplify system management.” 

To reduce operational costs and enhance regulatory reporting, SmartBank selected an in-house approach to data protection with Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. Delivering always-on services to customers securely, Veeam drives IT savings, reducing operational costs by 25% and allowing to redirect investment towards developing innovative banking products and services.

Automation from the Availability Suite also offers regulatory compliance, making it easy for the company to validate the integrity of their backups and generate reports that prove they are following regulatory requirements. This helps SmartBank maintain an excellent relationship with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and reduce overall business risk.

Veeam also ensures that the company can maintain complete control over all its data. Should there be any issue with the backup services in place, SmartBank will always be able to recover files, emails and application data using Veeam. It also established primary and secondary on-premises backup environments for long-term data retention, running on HPE StoreOnce servers. For added protection, Veeam solutions are deployed alongside Microsoft Azure Blob Storage to orchestrate all backup activities from end to end.