Bank of Botetourt takes care of its 15,000 customers with Veeam Cloud Data Management

The Business Challenge

Bank of Botetourt is a small community bank that serves southwestern Virginia and prides itself on being heavily involved and loyal to the community they serve. On top of its personal and business banking services, the Bank of Botetourt makes charitable contributions for education, culture, arts, social service agencies, charitable activities and community and economic development.

Even though the Bank of Botetourt has a relatively small reach, with just 15,000 customers and 150 employees, it was still very important that the financial data of the bank’s customers — and of the bank itself — remained safe and always available.

“We have 12,000 to 15,000 customers with a mobile device,” Andy Shotwell, Senior Vice President and CIO of Bank of Botetourt said. “In today’s environment, people want everything at their fingertips, so making sure people can reliably access their bank information is very important for business.”

Because of this, it became a problem that Bank of Botetourt’s old solution was inefficient, slow and overly complex. Backup jobs would take days at least and would often be incomplete, and when Bank of Botetourt started to expand and faced a staffing change in their IT department, the bank’s switch to a more effective backup solution became mandatory.

Not knowing where to start, Bank of Botetourt reached out to Veeam partner Advanced Logic Industries (ALI) to help make a decision. ALI said that Veeam could be just what they’re looking for. “It used to take us days to recover from data failure,” Shotwell said. “Now with Veeam Backup & Replication and the Instant VM Recovery, it takes as little as two hours to get everything back up and running — now it’s more like one and a half hours, since we’ve gotten more used to the product. This is extremely important for our business. All of our customer’s financial data is safe and available.”

The Veeam Solution

The Bank of Botetourt replaced their old, complex backup system with a Cloud Data Management solution based around Veeam Backup & Replication and Instant VM Recovery, a key feature of Veeam Backup & Replication.

“Our focus in IT is to simplify operations,” Shotwell said. “So, when we lost much of our IT operations staff [due to expansion and staffing changes], our expertise walked out the door, and that’s when the real problems started. When our new staff came in, we really wanted to have something that was consistent and easy-to-use. We looked to ALI to see what they’d suggest, and they said we’d be a good candidate for Veeam.”

With their old solution, Bank of Botetourt had to log into a portal just to access their backup infrastructure. On top of that, they had to log into that portal each time they wanted to keep track of how backup jobs were performing, if there were any alerts, errors or even failures, since their old solutions didn’t have a notification feature.

“Even though having a notification feature isn’t unique to Veeam, it really helped give us some peace of mind, particularly following a fairly large disaster recovery (DR) event we had last October,” said Shotwell. “The notifications, coupled with the uniquely intuitive interface of Veeam Backup & Replication really makes it easy to look into any problems that come up, even for people who aren’t IT experts.”

Veeam’s ultra-intuitive interface also saved Bank of Botetourt a ton of time by removing the need for their IT team to provide meticulous documentation.

“Documentation is extremely important to our business,” Shotwell said. “Veeam is one of the few solutions where you don’t really need documentation, because it’s so intuitive. Tell the Veeam engineers to not mess with that interface!”

Since using Veeam, the Bank of Botetourt has enjoyed having peace of mind regarding the safety of their data — both internal and external — in the event of a data failure or disaster. This allows the bank to run smoothly and efficiently on all fronts with minimal downtime, even for large data failures.

The Results

• Reliable backup of internal business documents increased business efficiency
  “Every document, every internal or proprietary report that the bank uses to make executive decisions is backed up with Veeam,” said Shotwell. “Veeam ensures that we run smoothly not only for our customers, but behind the scenes as well.”
• Constant real-time Availability of bank statements and check images increased customer satisfaction
  “It’s very important that we can back up the banking information of our customers,” Shotwell said. “People expect to be able to access their bank statements, check images and other information real-time. We need to be able to deliver this, and Veeam makes it a lot easier. It’s very important for business.”
• Drastically faster recovery times, allowing the Bank of Botetourt to get back to business
  “With Veeam, if something happens, we have confidence that everything can be backed up in 2.5 hours or less,” Shotwell said. “We didn’t have that comfort before.”
• About Advanced Logic Industries
  Advanced Logic Industries is an IT services firm that is dedicated to delivering technology solutions that solve business issues. It was formed in 1991 and is headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia and helps clients and staff throughout the mid-Atlantic U.S. and beyond.