2023 Community Bank Case Study Competition Journal

FIRST PLACE: The University of Tennessee at Martin

communication channel. This implementation is a customer quality-of-life improvement that provides security, primarily for the clients, to receive the help they need. CBTC also improved its mobile online banking platform in the first quarter of 2023 to its vendor’s most recent version. Improving the online banking platform required a significant amount of financial support. However, CBTC’s online banking platform is now visually and operationally competitive with all other banking platforms (Davis, Freschi, March 21, 2023). Another significant technological change that has recently improved is the bank’s server technology. CBTC moved from hardware server storage to redesign its virtual server farm to store, measure, and analyze data more securely and effectively. Prior to these upgrades the virtual servers were very fragmented and could not be managed easily. With the new improvements, all the virtual servers are connected and easily managed through one interface. The setup that CBTC currently enlists has plenty of room for any necessary server additions that may arise. These servers offer scalability and availability beyond what physical servers offer. The virtualization of servers allows new servers to be added almost instantly, and the new servers can be created to the exact specifications the bank needs. The bank no longer needs to wait for physical equipment to arrive when creating new servers. Servers tailored to the bank’s specifications and needs also allow CBTC to make the most use of its available storage, RAM, and CPU. Additionally, virtualization also provides increased business

continuity through enhanced server backup and replication features. CBTC currently replicates the server environment to an offsite secure storage facility every four hours. Recovery testing to the replica virtual servers is performed regularly (S. Freschi, personal communication, April 21, 2023). CBTC improved its security and operations by migrating to a real-time backup solution for its core banking system. Prior to this migration CBTC had a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 24 – 36 hours and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours. With the upgrades implemented by CBTC, the RTO is now one hour and the RPO is real-time since continuous replication to the backup site occurs; therefore, if the core systems were to fail, no loss of data would be incurred, and the system would be running again within one hour (Davis &Freschi, March 21, 2023). Having no loss of data and low server downtime enables clients to continue to be served while also providing the bank with additional data security and more operation time.

CBTC also improved its mobile online banking platform in the first quarter of 2023 to its vendor’s most recent version.

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