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A community-focused bank, First Bank & Trust wanted better protection for sensitive customer and bank data, stronger cyber resilience, and lower management overhead for a lean staff. The bank found its answer in Cohesity. In the event of an attack or system failure, any IT admin can recover a clean copy of data from one of three immutable Cohesity backups, including one copy in Cohesity FortKnox, a cyber vault. A unified interface for on-premises and cloud data sources reduced weekly management time from 10-12 hours to about 10 minutes.
When it comes to data security, First Bank & Trust doesn’t stop with regulatory compliance. “A higher concern is customer trust,” says Luke Schwingler, Director of Technology. “We take cyber resilience very seriously because our customers expect banking services to be available 24/7 on our bankeasy.com website and app. Staying ahead of threats instead of constantly putting out fires gives us more time to improve the IT environment and customer experience.”
First Bank & Trust previously backed up databases and virtual machines with a Dell EMC solution. When Schwingler took the helm in 2022, his first priority was stronger data protection and security. “Every business needs to be thinking about ransomware, and with the old solution I couldn’t confidently state that we had immutable backups,” he says. Another priority was simplifying backup management: Troubleshooting the old solution’s frequent failures consumed more than 25% of an IT admin’s work week. Rather than continue investing in the existing system, the bank decided to switch to a modern data-protection platform.
At his previous employer, Schwingler had solved the same operational challenges by switching to Cohesity Data Cloud. “When I first saw the Cohesity solution, I had a light-bulb moment,” he says. “Viewing the status of all on-prem and cloud workload backups in a single report significantly reduces management overhead.” Cohesity also provides leading security protections, including immutability, role-based access controls, multifactor authentication, and a feature to block any alterations to backup data, by anyone, until a specified expiration date.
To protect and secure data, the bank maintains three immutable Cohesity copies: two in on-prem clusters that replicate to each other plus an air-gapped copy in Cohesity FortKnox on AWS. Should a disaster or cyber attack strike, the IT team can restore data from any of the three copies. “Other vendors require separate management consoles for backing up on-prem and cloud data, which is no better than having separate vendors,” Schwingler says. “With Cohesity, we can centrally manage all data—virtual machines, file shares, Microsoft 365 data—from a single pane of glass. Knowing we can protect any future on-prem or cloud workloads without buying a new solution is even better.”
Schwingler and his staff regularly attend Cohesity webinars. “I like to work with forward-thinking vendors that I can learn from,” he says. “Our Cohesity account team understands that data protection is a piece of our overall cybersecurity strategy, and I meet with them regularly to hear their latest insights and industry trends.”
Weekly time spent managing backups has dropped from 10-12 hours to about 10 minutes, freeing up time for staff to work on a backlog of IT projects to improve the customer experience or add automation. “With Cohesity we no longer need to assign someone to troubleshoot backups,” says Schwingler. “We just take a look at an automatically generated report to see if a backup didn’t complete. That’s rare, and when it does happen, the Cohesity report tells us why. When I give presentations to IT professionals, I ask if they have somebody who is focused on backups. If the answer is yes, I tell them they need Cohesity.”
Non-disruptive, one-click upgrades save more time. “With Cohesity we can upgrade whenever it’s convenient, even during business hours,” says Schwingler. “Our admins are happy they don’t have to perform upgrades over the weekend.”
Resilience increased because applications or data lost to an attack or disaster can be recovered quickly from any of the three immutable Cohesity backups, including one in the cloud-based cyber vault. And if a production database fails or is attacked—an especially severe risk for financial institutions—First Bank & Trust can restore a clean copy of the database to its state no more than five minutes before the outage. The solution, Schwingler explains, is writing transaction logs to Cohesity SmartFiles every five minutes, replaying them to the most recent backup. “Cohesity provides a simple solution to restore a database with a 5-minute RPO [recovery point objective] that doesn’t require deep database skills or high-availability technologies,” he says.
The switch to Cohesity Data Cloud also eased demands on the bank’s network, avoiding network congestion that can affect the customer experience. With the old solution, First Bank & Trust ran a full backup every Saturday night, when network utilization would spike from 18% to 80%. “Now backups have zero impact on other workloads because Cohesity only backs up data that’s changed,” Schwingler says. “Avoiding network congestion allows our app and website to perform consistently whether a customer wants to move money Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. or Sunday at 3:00 a.m. Full recovery is faster because we can restore from the most recent snapshot instead of waiting to apply an incremental backup to the last full backup.”
Looking to the future, First Bank & Trust expects to use Cohesity’s APIs to act on new opportunities. “In the age of AI, it’s hard to know how our operations will change in three months,” says Schwingler. One plan is to have application upgrades automatically trigger a Cohesity snapshot of the application environment, an insurance policy if the upgrade fails.
“IT doesn’t drive revenue,” says Schwingler. “But IT can definitely help our revenue-generating departments avoid disruption. I’ve implemented Cohesity at two companies now, and Cohesity experts have helped educate me so I can make confident decisions about security and resilience.”
First Bank & Trust is a community-focused financial institution that provides a full range of banking services, including commercial lending, mortgages, wealth management, and agricultural financing. The company has more than 20 offices across South Dakota and Minnesota. Its online bank is branded bankeasy.com.
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