The Premier Bank PLC strengthens data resilience of critical banking services with Veeam

Through over 203 branches across Bangladesh and a modern digital channel, The Premier Bank PLC serves more than four million individuals and businesses. The bank has made its service-first approach a key pillar of its growth strategy and is continually striving to enhance its offerings.

“Over the years, we have expanded our banking portfolio substantially,” said A.M. Sabbir Hassan Chowdhury, Chief Information Technology Officer at The Premier Bank PLC. “Today, our digital systems support practically every product we have, from online and in-branch banking to our ATM network and point-of-sale integrations.” 

At The Premier Bank PLC, a team of 50 dedicated IT professionals work to maintain, enhance and protect the organization’s digital systems. The bank operates an extensive environment comprising more than 1,000 bare metal and virtual servers — and delivering always-on availability is a key goal for the team.

“As we progressed on our digital transformation journey, the amount of data and systems we needed to protect grew,” said Chowdhury. “In the past, we lacked a centralized approach to backing up these systems, relying instead on a patchwork of manual tools. It took around four full-time employees to manage the data protection process. Even then, we were still only backing up a small fraction of our IT environment.”

With ransomware risks on the rise, The Premier Bank PLC looked for a way to improve its security posture and enable fast recovery in the event of a disaster. 

“We operate in a highly regulated industry, so it’s crucial for us to stay on top of emerging requirements and adopt cybersecurity best practices,” said Chowdhury. “In recent years, some big players in the domestic banking sector have been impacted by cyberattacks. To mitigate risk and ensure compliance, we looked for a way to improve data resilience.”

As it began evaluating the capabilities of Veeam Data Platform, The Premier Bank PLC quickly realized it had found a highly effective data resilience solution.

“Before we adopted Veeam, we ran a thorough comparison with other similar solutions,” said Chowdhury. “We were very impressed at how fast it was to set up backup jobs with Veeam and restore everything from individual files to whole systems.”

Initially, The Premier Bank PLC adopted Veeam to protect its mission-critical core banking databases. Building on this early success, the organization subsequently expanded the solution to cover its entire IT environment, including a total of 6 TB across 1,000 virtual and bare-metal servers.

“We were one of the first banks in Bangladesh to adopt Veeam and our experience with the presales and support teams has always been excellent,” said Chowdhury. “We regularly reevaluate our data protection solution to ensure it is still fit for purpose and every year Veeam comes out on top. With Veeam, we have reduced the amount of time and effort required to manage our backups by 75%. The solution also enables us to compress our data by 50% to 65%, which allows us to protect our entire IT environment while keeping storage costs lean.”

For added protection against cyberattacks, The Premier Bank PLC recently adopted Veeam Data Cloud Vault. A pre-configured and fully managed solution, Veeam Data Cloud Vault offers the bank an always immutable, encrypted and logically air-gapped backup repository.

“Veeam Data Cloud Vault has flat per-terabyte pricing, including read/write API calls, data egress and data retrieval, which makes our spend transparent and predictable,” said Chowdhury.

Today, The Premier Bank PLC stores copies of its data at its primary data center, disaster recovery (DR) site and on Veeam Data Cloud Vault.

“Working with the leader in data resilience gives us the confidence that our mission-critical data is in safe hands,” said Chowdhury. “By having Veeam at the heart of our data protection strategy, we can mitigate the risk of cyberthreats and recover critical systems and data up to 65% faster.”

With a dependable data resilience solution from Veeam, The Premier Bank PLC can maximize availability and serve its customers effectively. “In the past, recovering one of our servers would have taken hours of work, but with Veeam we can do it in as little as 30 minutes — Veeam never fails,” said Chowdhury.

• Reduces backup management requirements by 75%
  “With Veeam, we get automated alerts about the success and failure of backup jobs, which means that we only need one person to manage our backups,” said Chowdhury.
• Cuts recovery time objectives (RTOs) by 65%
  Using Veeam, The Premier Bank PLC replaces hours of manual recovery work with a highly streamlined process — enabling it to spin up systems from backups in as little as 30 minutes.
• Mitigates ransomware risks with immutable, encrypted and air-gapped storage
  By adopting Veeam Cloud Data Vault, The Premier Bank PLC stores backups that cannot be changed after being written, which helps to ensure that there is always a clean copy of its data available to recover from.