Scotland’s first ever Building Society started life in March 1848 as the Edinburgh Property Investment Company, changing its name to Scottish Building Society in 1929.

Since those early days, there has been a substantial increase in the number of customers and range of products offered, matching Scotland’s developing social and economic needs, whilst remaining true to the original tradition of thrift and careful money-management.

A traditional mutual Building Society, the Scottish Building Society offers mortgages and savings accounts to customers through six main branches and a network of agency offices throughout Scotland.

The Society decided to review its business continuity and disaster recovery arrangements to upgrade systems with the most robust solution available that would allow for replication of systems at an alternative location and ensure a quicker failover response in the event of a major systems failure.

Castle Computer Services recommended VMware virtualisation as the most flexible, robust solution. VMware provides rapid, reliable and cost effective business continuity. It also delivers server consolidation and enables disaster recovery.

Using VMware the Scottish Building Society was able to replace the existing Hewlett Packard system in Edinburgh with an IBM system and then re-utilise the old hardware to enhance the existing DR functionality by creating a ‘replicated’ off-site disaster recovery data centre at the Society’s Business Continuity location based in Livingston*. Now if the Edinburgh HQ office were to experience a serious failure (all systems, including data and applications), the recovery time is reduced from hours to minutes. The result is a robust effective disaster recovery site that also provides an important audit trail for FSA compliance.

Alison Quilter, IT Manager, Scottish Building Society, said:

“As a financial services organisation with a wide network of branch and agency offices it’s essential that we maintain an IT infrastructure which supports the Society’s overall business strategy and also ensures stability for the continuity management of the Society’s systems. The VMware solution has achieved that goal for us. We have a cost effective setup which ensures that in the event of a system failure in Edinburgh we can quickly failover to our replicated DR site, maintaining continuity of service to our customers and staff.”

Alan Quinn, Managing Director, Castle Computer Services said:

“We recognised the need for a secure, flexible solution for the Scottish Building Society and they now have in place a best-practice proven business continuity system that will also deliver long-term cost savings.”