NeoScale

Overview

For more than fifty years, Oregon Community Credit Union has been serving central Oregon residents with an innovative range of products and services. The credit union was founded by a small group of State of Oregon employees who pooled their money together in a shoe box and has grown to be the third largest credit union in Oregon with more than 90,000 members and more than $730 million in assets. Oregon Community Credit Union not only takes member service seriously, they also are on the leading edge in terms of security solutions. Case in point, they have installed a state-of-the-art tape encryption system from industry leader NeoScale Systems.

Mission: Secure Protection of Tape Data

With horror stories in the news every week about lost or stolen laptops and backup tapes, the senior management team at the credit union knew they had to do everything within their powers to protect their critical data as it traveled offsite to a third-party tape vaulting vendor. They also took into account the growth of identity theft and network intrusions when they considered the heightened need for backed-up data to be secured during transit and in storage. Joseph Bongcayao, CCEA at Oregon Community Credit Union was tasked with finding an affordable solution that would strike a balance between security, ease of use, and scalability.

Because tape encryption is somewhat of an emerging market, Bongcayao worked hard to find solutions that would meet all of these requirements. He explains “We knew from the outset that we did not want a software solution that would put too much strain on our servers.” That requirement eliminated many tape backup vendors whose software was far too slow and resource intensive. Bongcayao searched the Internet, went to various discussion groups, and generally performed a great deal of due diligence in his search for an appliance-based solution that would give him the performance levels that he was looking for. His research eventually led him to the NeoScale CryptoStor ® Tape appliance, which is the first enterprise-class data protection and privacy appliance specifically designed for tape media. 

Peace of Mind: Confidential Member Information Protected at All Times

Because of Oregon Community Credit Union’s complex environment, Bongcayao said “We really needed a high performance appliance that would meet our nightly backup window; NeoScale fit that description.” In fact, Oregon Community Credit Union purchased two systems: one for their system backups and the other for their host system. These two systems feed the NeoScale CryptoStor® Tape appliance which then directs the encrypted output to ADIC tape drives.

In terms of return on investment ROI, Bongcayao points out “the cost to notify our members just one time in the event of a tape loss would exceed the cost of the NeoScale system.” Of course, there also are indirect costs such as bad publicity that are avoided when tape encryption is used to protect data as it is moved and stored offsite. Bongcayao concluded “the NeoScale solution works extremely well and the support has been very good. We have tested our backups and restored information and the system is running smoothly.”