Situation:

The First American Corporation (FAC) provides business information and related products and services in three primary segments: title insurance, real estate, and consumer services. Each of these business segments leverages First American's advanced technology infrastructure designed to automate production and electronically speed delivery of information across the company's network and directly to its customers. First American Trust, FSB, a federal savings bank and part of the consumer services division of FAC, is supported by an IT shop consisting of about 30 Windows NT/2000 servers, a Microsoft Exchange server, 12 Cisco routers, and over 100 Windows workstations. The whole system must be up and running, constantly monitored, and able to be completely rebuilt to ensure continuity.

Problem:

Henry Jenkins, Trust's vice-president of information services, needed a solution to help manage change and maintain control of the IT infrastructure. Information residing on servers at the company's headquarters and routers through which electronic money traveled has to be secure. A tough job when data is gathered manually across the Microsoft and Cisco platforms. Since Trust is a bank, it is tightly regulated by the federal government and must comply with guidelines from the Office of Thrift Supervision. In short, data must be in constant, secure flow and Trust must prove that its infrastructure is compliant and secure at all times.

Solution:

Jenkins turned to Ecora Software and Configuration Auditor.

"I was turned on to what Ecora was all about a while ago and realized we'd never really done a good job documenting our systems," Jenkins says. "That shows up in two areas: disaster recovery and change management."

Benefits:

Disaster recovery: "I'd like to have the kind of documentation where, should my staff, God forbid, get wiped out, some consultants could come in and put everything back together again," Jenkins says. "Ecora helps put that plan in motion. I have been using Ecora to turn out several DR folders with comprehensive documentation, and we're raising a hot site in another city." For First American, with headquarters in Orange County, the feared disaster is earthquakes. "Someone must have thought it prudent to build our data center in the basement," Jenkins says. "So fires, floods, lines breaking-it's all possible."

Change management: "Change control is vital to us because we're a bank," Jenkins says. "We have to be running during our production hours, which are between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. If somebody changes something and suddenly nothing works, we need to be able to trace back that change immediately. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We need to make sure we can undo those good intentions: for example, if someone tried to apply the latest fix from Microsoft without properly testing it."

Cisco support: "We have about a dozen Cisco routers, and I am most concerned with the five that are crucial; those ones we have Ecora licenses for" says Jenkins. "As part of our banking services, we do wire transfers. The data that is transferring those wires crosses those five crucial routers. So I want to know whether something has changed, how to rebuild it if it goes down, or, if we need to bring up a separate piece of equipment, what kind of configuration we had on main routers. Those are crucial questions for us."

Compliance management: "We justified getting Ecora because our regulators want us to have this," says Jenkins. "For us it wasn't so much calculating ROI from having a better change management process, but rather our knowledge of what levels of information federal regulators from the Office of Thrift Supervision require. And here is a product that can generate the documentation they expect to see (and usually more than what they expect to see), more than satisfying OTS requirements."

Jenkins is so pleased with Ecora software that he is considering the purchase of additional server licenses and adding Configuration Auditor for IIS to his configuration management plan. "The truth is, I haven't seen any other product that seems to compete with it," Jenkins says.