Future-proof banking: GLKB boosts data resilience with Veeam

As a locally rooted bank, GLKB combines tradition with innovation in the heart of Switzerland. It provides home mortgage credit financing, savings accounts, and asset management to individuals and business banking services to leading organizations in high-tech industries.

“It’s crucial for the whole canton that we maximize IT availability and cyber resilience to ensure fast and seamless services that delight our customers,” said Christian Dürst, System Engineer at GLKB. “As we modernized our IT infrastructure and introduced hybrid cloud deployment options, we needed a strong partner that could help us protect all our applications and services across multiple architectures, hypervisors, and platforms.” GLKB relies on on-premises environments running virtual machines with VMware vSphere and containers with persistent data on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Besides basic recovery of entire virtual machines, GLKB needed to be able to restore individual databases, files and Microsoft Active Directory data to minimize disruptions for business users. Additionally, the company uses the cloud collaboration solution Microsoft 365 including emails, file sharing with OneDrive and SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams — all of which needed to be backed up reliably.

Seeing an opportunity to expand its business and build on its digital services, GLKB also offers three software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that are widely used by regional banks in other cantons, pension funds, insurance companies, and similar financial services businesses.

“Because we’re also a SaaS provider, the expectations are even higher,” explained Dürst. “To ensure smooth banking operations across our entire offering, we need to meet high performance, reliability, and business continuity objectives.”

When GLKB refreshed its IT infrastructure to accommodate business growth, it worked with trusted long-time partner first frame networkers to move its virtualized environment to VMware virtualization running on HPE servers. This move was the ideal opportunity for the bank to refresh its data resilience solution to meet emerging and future requirements.

After evaluating the market, GLKB selected Veeam backup and replication solutions to support continuous banking services running on a diverse IT infrastructure.

“Veeam is a market leader that offers data backup and recovery functionality that will streamline our processes and improve our business continuity,” said Dürst. “And because Veeam is a mature solution and very widely used in Switzerland, it’s always easy for us to find highly competent local resources to design and enhance our Veeam solutions for us.”

Today, GLKB protects 220 virtual machines (VMs) with Veeam. Most VMs run Microsoft Windows Server, some run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and a few are turnkey appliances provided by software vendors. By combining Veeam with powerful new – backup-storage systems, the bank accelerated data backups and recovery. It takes copies of mission-critical data and stores it as safe, redundant, and immutable backups on a storage system, that is able to handle immutable backups with highly efficient data deduplication features.

“With immutable backups from Veeam in combination with a storage-system that supports immutable backups our data is better protected than ever before,” commented Dürst. “By ensuring all our data is backed up and we can recover it rapidly, Veeam helps us deliver round-the-clock services to customers.”

GLKB also deployed Veeam to protect two Kubernetes-clusters that uses Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to run four applications in about 30 containers. To ensure reliable backups of its pods of up to 50 GB in size, GLKB worked with first frame and Veeam to implement Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes, connected to a storage solution, which provides a high-performance S3-compatible object storage platform.

When GLKB moved its collaboration and productivity tools into the cloud, the bank adopted Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to give it access to a local copy of business data including emails, corporate chat messages, and shared documents. As a next step, GLKB is considering Veeam Backup for Microsoft Entra ID to safeguard critical identity and access management services in the cloud.

To reduce costs, increase flexibility and support its evolving hybrid cloud strategy, first frame provides GLKB with a monthly, consumption-based licensing model for its Veeam solution. This approach enables GLKB to cut IT costs while scaling protection in line with changing workload requirements. The cost-efficient subscription model provides a flexible, portable licensing structure that allows coverage to move easily across different environments as infrastructure evolves.

“With our hybrid cloud strategy taking shape, we have shifted some workloads around over the years,” said Dürst. “Leveraging a monthly license subscription, we now only pay for the number of instances that we actually need while scaling when we need to, giving us cost-effective agility.”

GLKB takes advantage of built-in reporting functionality within the Veeam solutions to simplify compliance with regulatory requirements. The bank carries out frequent data recovery tests to satisfy auditors and meet its own internal targets.

“Veeam gives us great control and visibility into data resilience, so we can demonstrate ongoing adherence to the highest standards,” added Dürst. “Operating in a highly regulated industry and facing rising expectations from both customers and policy makers, we greatly value the confidence that Veeam gives us in our ability to protect and recover data comprehensively and efficiently.”

Through Veeam, GLKB is opening further modernization options for the future, helping the bank act on opportunities to improve services for customers.

“The hypervisor market is unpredictable at the moment,” said Dürst. “Veeam gives us the freedom to enable data resilience across multiple platforms with a single solution, which is a great benefit for us. We’re early in the process, but we’re considering options including Proxmox VE and HPE Morpheus software, which are both supported by Veeam. This is just one example of how Veeam allows us to refine our IT infrastructure without compromising on data resilience.”

• Enables rapid data recovery across multiple platforms to reduce risk of business interruptions
  By using Veeam immutable backups with fast, efficient storage integration, GLKB can keep services running smoothly for customers.
• Reduced costs through flexible monthly subscriptions for data resilience services
  Working with first frame, GLKB streamlined its licensing for Veeam through a cost-efficient monthly subscription, ensuring it only pays for what it uses and can scale as required.
• Futureproofs data resilience processes by supporting leading hypervisors.
  Veeam’s growing support for more hypervisor options enables GLKB to pick the most suitable platform without having to completely change its proven backup and recovery processes.