Overview
Chartered in 1973, San Francisco-based Spectrum Federal Credit Union serves over 12,000 members. These members include more than 50 Select Employee Groups (SEG), including the well-known brokerage firm of Charles Schwab and the world’s largest construction company, Bechtel. When the issue arose on how to protect their members’ personal data residing on backup tapes, Spectrum FCU took no chances – they and their Techical Advisory Board made the decision to encrypt this important information with the help of NeoScale Systems, an undisputed leader in this emerging market.
The Challenge
Being true to Spectrum FCU’s mission statement "to ensure members' trust by providing excellent financial products and services," it made perfect sense that they would insist on encrypting any sensitive stored data leaving their facilities. Unencrypted data moving between credit union branches ran some level of risk: a tape could go astray due to some courier's lackadaisical attitude, administrative incompetence, or outright theft. The results would be disastrous. Inevitably, the credit union would face a public relations nightmare, or worse, serious litigations.
Located in California, Spectrum FCU faced another regulatory hurdle – California Senate Bill 1386 designed to protect consumers' personal information. Under this law, Spectrum FCU must publicly notify customers when data had been lost. Even if Spectrum was not located in one of the “lost data disclosure” states, all federally insured credit unions must disclose breaches to their members, thanks to Appendix B of the NCUA Rules & Regs Part 748. Even if they were not federally insured, disclosure would be the right thing to do and would most likely be mandated in all fifty states by an act of Congress in the near future.
The Solution
The $120M asset credit union installed a NeoScale CryptoStor Tape appliance between their in-house UltraData core system and their IBM external tape drive. The system integrated seamlessly, and was managed via NeoScale’s intuitive Web-based interface.
The Result
With the NeoScale hardware encryption appliance in place, the Spectrum FCU had no worries about their tapes as they moved across the country – if one were to go missing, they would not be required to notify customers because all of the state and federal regulations specifically exempt encrypted lost data from consumer notification requirements. As for the bonus, NeoScale’s purpose-built appliance handled Spectrum FCU encryption process at wire-speed with no performance bottlenecks.
NeoScale At A Glance
-Founded in 2000, NeoScale is the trusted leader in enterprise storage security and a recognized authority in Global Key Management
-Headquartered in the Silicon Valley, CA, NeoScale solutions are globally deployed in more than 35 countries
-Tamper proof appliance-based solutions with true wire-speed encryption of data on disk, virtual tape, or tape media
-Award-winning global key management to ensure customers’ business continuity and productivity in sharing sensitive information across the extended enterprise
-Successfully driving partnerships with vendors of encryption devices and software applications that are deployed throughout the enterprise IT infrastructure, from mainframes to open systems.
-Nearly 300 customers worldwide, including a fifth of the Global 50 companies, Fortune 500 financial institutions, healthcare organizations, domestic and foreign government agencies, as well as small-medium enterprises
-For more information, visit www.neoscale.com.
