AgFirst Farm Credit Bank

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. Beginning in the early 2000s, AgFirst's growth presented a range of demands on the firm's IT operations, and its challenges broke across four basic areas: compliance, backup, security management, and email management. The organization implemented a variety of Symantec products including Symantec Control Compliance Suite, Altiris Client Management Suite, Deployment Solution, Carbon Copy Solution, and Inventory Solution, Veritas NetBackup and Symantec Enterprise Vault.

A Total Operational and Economic Impact analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group pinpointed the following areas of business value: $1,319,339 in labor cost avoidance from the centralization of the data backup operations, $462,802 in staff time spent managing and troubleshooting backups, $45,465 in vulnerability analysis and intelligence reporting for network security, $426,859 in labor savings with Managed Security Services, $39,526 in streamlining issue resolution for end users, $283,209 in software package installation and re-installation, $546,817 in more efficient management of compliance reporting, $285,845 in data storage savings through compression and single-instance archiving, and $6,523 in cost savings by reducing IT time spent remediating mailbox-related issues.