Bank saves money with unified enterprise archiving platform

BMO Harris, a subsidiary of Bank of Montreal, has grown rapidly through acquisition activity. With the mergers and acquisitions, the bank accrued 102 legacy applications that were expensive to maintain. The organization wanted to implement a new low-cost, long-term data retention solution for the legacy applications. The bank considered the need to access retired data including retention and purge requirements as well as the issues of data integrity and security.

With the help of Flatirons Solutions, BMO Harris Bank chose to implement the unified enterprise archiving platform EMC InfoArchive from EMC. The solution enabled the bank to quickly retire legacy applications, freeing up dollars for IT innovation. EMC InfoArchive enables quick data retirement, purge and retention policy implementation and audit functionality, according to the company.

Darryl Lueck, VP and lead technology officer at BMO Harris Bank, says, “BMO Harris was able to realize an immediate savings of $5 million per year with ongoing reductions. It’s had a great payback for us as well as meeting the regulatory requirements.”

Deployment of EMC InfoArchive enabled the bank to:

• reduce costs and gain easy data access,
• eliminate fees of $285,000/per month that kept legacy applications in read-only mode,
• complete the project within 12 weeks instead of 12 months, and
• eliminate only one main application and have $3.8 million available annually for innovative IT projects.

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