Safe Systems, recently ranked amongMSPmentor’s global top-100 managed service providers, and national provider of compliance-centric IT support and hosted services, today announced Pensacola, Fla.-based bank holding company Five Flags Banks (Bank of the South, The Warrington Bank, First Navy Bank) has successfully implemented a virtual IT environment supported by Safe Systems’ network management solution, NetComply.
“As a three-bank holding company, this move from legacy servers to a condensed, virtual environment was a huge undertaking,” said James Brammer, ISO at Five Flags Banks. “However, it was one of the easiest implementations we have ever done. We knew we needed a system that would afford us cost savings and a more efficient means of running our IT environment. We chose to work with Safe Systems because of the company’s financial institution expertise and knowledge of regulatory expectations.”
Five Flags moved all of its servers into one colocation shared by all three of its banks. This facility houses the virtualized server network that supports their 75 users across 7 sites. Prior to the implementation, Five Flags had to manually verify patch updates machine by machine, often relying on rudimentary reporting capabilities to ensure its systems were up to date. The bank now has a single portal to access the status of its entire virtual network at any time, including virus updates and critical application patching such as Adobe and Java, keeping it ahead of regulators. Safe Systems designed, managed and implemented the virtualization project from beginning to end.
“Manually updating patches is a headache and third party software can be expensive,” Brammer continued. “Five Flags had grown into and out of its original hardware and needed to take a more proactive approach to keep ahead of audit and regulatory requirements. Safe Systems provides us with a simple, more redundant and compliant infrastructure that runs effortlessly behind the scenes with 99.9 percent uptime and we have a team of experts available for support.
The virtual IT network consolidates multiple operating system environments onto a single server supported by a fully redundant backup . This simplifies back office operations, increases response time to changing business demands and improves business continuity planning by providing high availability for mission critical servers. Combining this back office technology with the FFIEC-compliant IT management toolset, NetComply allows the bank to completely outsource day-to-day IT functions and management to a hosted environment with Safe Systems and its SOC 2 Type II audited facilities.
“We are proud to partner with an institution such as Five Flags Banks,” says Safe Systems CEO Danny Johnston. “Financial institutions like Five Flags can benefit tremendously from the efficiencies gained by running an automated, virtual environment. It makes everything simpler, faster and more redundant.”
About Safe Systems
Founded in 1993, Safe Systems is a national leader in providing compliance-centric IT solutions exclusively to financial institutions, working with more than 600 financial institutions and managing more than 25,000 network devices nationwide. Safe Systems' scalable and cost effective solutions include IT support and managed services, compliance solutions, business continuity and disaster recovery, hosted email, data vaulting, network design and installation, security services, and IT and compliance training. Safe Systems helps financial institutions significantly decrease costs, increase performance, and improve compliance posture. For additional information about Safe Systems, Inc., please visit http://www.safesystems.com, Twitter: @SafeSystems, or call 877.752.0550