Northland Case Study

"Not only does this backup save us time, I can't say enough about how well the bare metal restore worked for us, and how inexpensive this portion truly is. Again we do save time, but more importantly, we save frustration from dealing with tape backups and restores."

Steve, IT Director
Northland Financial

Northland Financial Case Study

"Connecting Point Computer Center's Dakota Backup has allowed us to take a huge step forward in protecting our data with their state-of-the-art data protection solution. Previously we were backing up nine locations in a fragmented manner, using tape based solutions. Now, instead of having our IT staff dedicate many hours each week traveling to support the tape based solutions, we can manage it centrally using Dakota Backup. We also sleep well at night knowing our data is safe, secure, reliable, and readily available."

TK, Network Administrator
Meade School District 46-1

Northland Financial Case Study

Northland Financial is a locally owned, independent community bank originally founded in 1932 as the Bank of Steele. Today, Northland Financial is a financial center complete with banking, insurance, investment and leasing services with over $150 million in assets – with locations in Steele, Medina, Downtown Bismarck and North Bismarck, North Dakota.

With 24 servers (some as simple as workstations hosting voicemail software), Northland Financial has multiple platforms and applications, eight laptop users and roughly 50 users.

"The compelling event that had us considering a different backup solution was in one word: Tapes," says IT Manager, Steven Fercho. "In my time in the IT industry, I'd come to one main conclusion about backups – backing up to tapes was frustrating. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't and sometimes there was no rhyme or reason to why it failed. Also with redundancy, to be fully redundant with a tape backup, you needed a second server with the same hardware/software just in case something happened to the backup server during a disaster – it just didn't seem to fit the scope of our DR planning."

Having some experience in the past with Connecting Point, a Dakota Backup partner, Connecting Point turned Northland Financial on to Dakota Backup. "We had been in talks with other offsite backup companies as well, but figured we'd give Dakota Backup's trial a test run and see how we felt about the service and product before making a decision," Fercho says.

"Overall we have been very happy with Dakota Backup's service during our trial. We even had a server go down that was covered under the bare metal restore option, and I was amazed at how well that recovery worked. After getting the image put back onto the server and rebooting, everything was back to normal – I can't explain how good of a feeling that was. I've had to rebuild servers before but was always able to get information off hard drives for rebuilding. This time the hard drives were unreadable so this would've definitely been my worst rebuild to date! Thanks to Dakota Backup, it was a breeze. I would definitely recommend your solution to a friend, and I would make sure to push the bare metal restore option!"

According to Fercho, "Not only does this backup save us time, I can't say enough about how well the bare metal restore worked for us, and how inexpensive this portion truly is. Again we do save time, but more importantly, we save frustration from dealing with tape backups and restores."

While many things have changed over Northland Financial's long history, one thing has remained the same: commitment to their customers and communities. Dakota Backup is just one way Northland Financial is achieving that goal.