Every organization faces challenges in protecting its data, but typically not as many as the Publix Employees Federal Credit Union (PEFCU) does. In addition to the usual worries about hackers and meeting the financial services industry’s strict regulations, the Lakeland, FL-based credit union also has to contend with Florida’s often-punishing hurricane season, which nearly destroyed its primary data center in 2004.

The responsibility of addressing that multi-pronged challenge falls on the shoulders of Karen Sullivan, who personally leads the data protection effort as chief information and security officer. She appeared on latest episode of CubeConversations in an exclusive interview with Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante to share how PEFCU evolved to meet the realities of its complicated situation.

The association has come a long way since its original setup, which required administrators to relegate backups and archiving workloads to separate systems in a time-consuming routine that took resources away from business objectives. And because the data generated from its production environment was stored on legacy tapes, finding the capacity to hold that information posed an added obstacle for Sullivan’s team. That gave raise to an entirely new set of issues that hindered the entire operation.

With the magnetic drives taking up more and more space in its facilities, PEFCU  had to outsource a part of the operation to a third party. The arrangement not only cost a great deal of money but also left the company relying on factors beyond its control for data availability, which led to wild variations in estimated recovery times. varying wildly.

“Before we moved, we’d be talking three or four hours to bring ourselves back up and sometimes up to eight hours depending on the service provider’s equipment,” Sullivan explained. “We couldn’t depend on that.”

When the hurricane ravaged the data center last year, Sullivan decided that it was time for change. The company embarked on a broad modernization effort that saw its old backup systems and archive library replaced with three disk-based Data Domain Corp. appliances scattered hundreds of miles apart.

Sullivan told Vellante that the upgrade enabled her team to consolidate data protection efforts into a single platform, significantly reducing the amount of work involved and streamlining the entire operation. PEFCU also uses EMC’s replication software to synchronize the appliances, which she said enables her team to quickly recover in the event that the production environment becomes unavailable without creating any substantial gaps.

That functionality is just as useful for protecting against hackers as it against bad weather, she added. If an attack breaches the company’s defenses and corrupts the integrity of the environment, her department can merely roll back the cloud to a previous recovery point and replace the compromised data with the intact copy from the secondary site.

“Data Domain is nice because everything goes to the appliance, all the archiving and backup workloads, but then it’s cascading from here to our disaster recovery site and then again onto the warm site,” Sullivan said “So we know our data is always there, which is important for regulatory compliance.”