The company moved first to protect 82 Wintel production servers by mirroring their mission-critical data out of state and encrypting any data shipped off-site.

The storage effort has also added the use of Internet SCSI protocols with CNL's Microsoft Exchange servers to increase mailbox sizes while cutting the cost and complexity of direct-attached storage.

The storage project was completed late last year.

The new architecture has increased Exchange uptime to 99.8 percent, reduced e-mail restores to 10 minutes or less, and reduced full backup and recovery times from two days to eight hours, said Joel Schwalbe, vice president of technical services at CNL Financial.

Schwalbe said the company decided to mirror data from Orlando to a hot site in Atlanta after reports that other financial services firms were unable to bring systems back up quickly after disasters.