Fiserv, Inc.

Reliable data backup and disaster recovery protection are essential to Fiserv’s business. Disaster recovery is an especially important issue in the financial industry, where operations often span multiple locations and include a variety of software installations. Critical interdependencies mean that problems occurring in local systems can create vulnerabilities at geographically remote facilities. Ensuring that security measures were properly enforced was just one of the array of challenges the company faced.

For several years, Fiserv relied on home-grown scripts to monitor its servers housing data protection applications. The team collecting the data from these scripts had to carefully parse and re-input the data into spreadsheets before it could be shared with other employees. This time-intensive approach slowed communication and increased the company's cost of managing IT processes as well as critical equipment and applications. Equally important, the scripts did not provide the visibility or level of detail necessary to confirm that data protection services were meeting business objectives.

Fiserv needed a way to protect its data and ensure 100 percent successful backup and recovery processes. To be effective, any new monitoring solution would have to work across multiple systems and complex environments in real time while integrating well with IBM® Tivoli Storage Manager, a key component of Fiserv’s server management. Any prospective solution would also need to alert personnel to backup process issues immediately, enabling them to proactively identify and resolve potential problems before they affected performance and user experience.