Dan Barbattini, Senior VP and Director of IT, Bank of Choice

Security Makeover

Consolidating your security infrastructure

The people of Milan, Italy are known for their excess. Beautiful cars, bountiful food, exotic clothing - being over-the-top is a compliment to many Italians. And, until recently, the city looked the same on the information technology side of things.

The city's municipal government, known in Italian as Comune di Milano, employs 20,000 people to serve a population of 1.5 million. Its employees are spread across 700 buildings. Automobile fines, local taxes, trash bills, anti-mosquito GPS-based service data - all of these things sit on a complex architecture of more than 50 different data centers. This autumn, in a bid to streamline management and keep data fresh, the organization will start to consolidate all municipal records into one data center, explains Enrico Fedeli, the city's chief technology officer.

"Consolidating the network means having more control over the computers connected to the network infrastructure," he explains. "We are, of course, monitoring all the traffic passing through the main data center, but it would be very difficult and expensive for us today to manage and monitor every single remote site. The challenge is to put everybody under control - security control."

Cost becomes a byproduct

Indeed, Comune di Milano is similar to other organizations with its consolidation goals, explains Greg Malacane, senior business analyst with research and consulting firm The Alchemy Solutions Group, Inc. "Only now are technologies available that allow IT security to manage endpoints globally from a single console. This consolidation offers the opportunity to bring IT operational and economic efficiencies in line with business drivers supporting cost control and process improvement."

This is a sea change from only five years ago when companies first consolidated because multiple data centers and IT infrastructures cost more than a single infrastructure. Today, cost still matters, but savings are usually a byproduct rather than a primary goal. Organizations worry more about making their infrastructures easier to manage, meeting compliance regulations, and minimizing the potential for security breaches.

Consolidation proves to be the right choice

For Dan Barbattini, senior vice president and director of IT for Bank of Choice, based in Colorado, the consolidation impetus fell into the "all-of-the-above" category. Initially, his company's need for consolidation sprang from growth. Bank of Choice grew quickly from a small community bank to one that recently surpassed the $1 billion asset mark. Three years ago, the now-eight-year-old company started expanding and making acquisitions - including one bank that had seven branches - bringing its branch total to 19. Since the company markets its use of technology as a differentiator, Barbattini knew he needed to build the new branches and their infrastructure up to the same level as the original branch.

"One of my first concerns was getting a solid security infrastructure in place," he says. "I spent the first eight months with the bank concentrating on firewalls, antivirus, antispam - all the basics. We began to cancel contracts and services that [the other banks and branches] had with vendors and outsourcers and bring that into one central area of management with the Bank of Choice. Meanwhile, we put together a corporate data center."

Barbattini and his team dismantled the IT infrastructures already in place and started from scratch. Today, the company has a single point of control for all 19 locations: a data center built from the ground up using best-in-class hardware and software - including solutions from Symantec. This enabled a more efficient staffing structure, with the company's eight IT employees now working out of a single reporting unit, which Barbattini manages.

"We're using an existing location as a disaster recovery site, about 50 miles from our main office," he explains. There, the company uses Symantec's Veritas Cluster Server for VMware virtualization, which enables fast data recovery and duplicates what is in the main data center.