Veeam Helps QIIB Deliver Seamless, Personalised Banking Services

The Business Challenge

Qatar International Islamic Bank (QIIB) remains true to its Qatari heritage and values. QIIB’s family-friendly attitude and personal approach are just a few of the many reasons customers choose QIIB as a banking partner for their personal and business needs.

QIIB offers innovative banking solutions based on customers’ needs, including mobile, Internet and phone banking. The goal is to provide efficient transactional banking and a positive customer experience. This puts QIIB right in line with global banking trends.

In a survey of international banking leaders conducted by the Digital Banking Report in 2017, improving the customer journey and providing a positive customer experience was ranked as the number one trend, as well as the top strategic priority.

To improve the customer journey, QIIB continually develops new banking services that are fast, easy and seamless to use, such as Western Union transfers and a voice-activated system that lets customers reset personal identification numbers (PINs) for their debit cards.

Before launching new services, QIIB tests them for six to eight months. The test environment makes up 60% of QIIB’s IT infrastructure, and the production environment, which supports all banking operations, comprises 40%. Critical data in both environments must be available continuously for QIIB to provide efficient transactional banking and a positive customer experience. Slow back up and recovery of critical data put the IT team on high alert.

“Slow backup and recovery made it challenging for us to ensure critical data was available at all times,” said Shazin Ali, Head of the IT Infrastructure at QIIM. “How could we tell the executive team that slow backup and recovery might delay the testing and launch of a new service or prevent customers from completing their mobile transactions?”

The Veeam Solution

QIIB replaced legacy backup with Veeam Availability Suite. One year later, QIIB received the 2017 Banking Excellence Award from the World Union of Arab Bankers for excellence in straight-through transactional processing.

“Veeam was definitely one of the reasons we won this award,” Ali said. “Backup speed increased by 75% and recovery speed increased by 92% thanks to integration between Veeam and Dell EMC VNX, our primary storage.”

Veeam provides modern data protection for QIIB’s critical data, enabling the bank to provide customers with fast, efficient banking solutions and a positive banking experience. Veeam backs up and replicates 45 TB of data across 300 Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere virtual machines from VNX storage snapshots in two data centers.

“Modern data protection from Veeam helps us deliver seamless, personalized service to customers,” Ali said. “Veeam also supports the development and testing of new banking products. We learned this very quickly during Veeam’s proof of concept.”

During the proof of concept, Veeam dramatically improved recovery speed of the bank’s virtual machines. QIIB restored them from a backup in three hours. Ali said restoring them with legacy backup would have taken three days.

“That’s when we knew Veeam was the best solution for us,” Ali said. “If we hadn’t been using Veeam at the time, we might have lost part of our testing environment, which would have delayed each product launch by at least one month. That’s bad for the business and our customers."

Veeam saves time and money too.

“Veeam is so easy to use and so reliable that we no longer need a full-time backup administrator,” Ali said. “Our backup administrator spends less than half his time on backup because of Veeam, so he spends the rest of his time on server and storage maintenance.”

Veeam also saves on agent fees. By replacing legacy backup with Veeam, QIIB saved significant money.

Ali said Veeam is synonymous with confidence.

“Veeam instills confidence immediately. We know our critical data is being backed up quickly and reliably, and we know we can recover from our backups. Veeam makes life easier."

The Results

• Delivers modern data protection for critical banking data
  Personal banking doesn’t end when the business day ends. Veeam helps QIIB provide customers with fast, efficient, on-demand banking solutions 24/7/365.
• Supports new product development, test and launch plans
  To improve the customer experience, QIIB continually develops and tests new banking services. Veeam makes sure that data is available continuously so launch plans stay on track.
• Saves time and money, reducing backup management hours by more than 50%
  “The biggest benefit of using Veeam is modern data protection, but saving time and money is a nice bonus,” Ali said.