From DORA to data trust: How Sydbank relies on Veeam

Sydbank is on the cusp of major change as it joins forces with two other leading Danish banks.

“We are merging with Arbejdernes Landsbank and Vestjysk Bank to form AL Sydbank A/S,” said Steffen Gildhoff, Department Manager of Data Center Operations at Sydbank. “As a result, we expect our data to grow exponentially.”

Data is crucial to Sydbank’s operations, helping the bank stay one step ahead of the competition. At the same time, the bank must gather and submit data to comply with a host of regulations, including DORA.

“The financial services sector is more regulated than ever before, and the introduction of DORA marks another increase in our obligations,” said Gildhoff. “However, data resilience isn’t just about ticking boxes for us. We recognized that it was crucial to our competitive advantage too, so it was essential that we got it right.”

To help navigate DORA compliance and enable round-the-clock data integrity and availability for the business, Sydbank chose Veeam. As a long-time Veeam user, the bank extended its investment in Veeam to protect its large and quickly growing on-premises data estate.

“Sydbank first selected Veeam because of the outstanding integration with VMware,” said Gildhoff. “As we grew more familiar with using Veeam in our everyday operations, we decided to standardize on Veeam Data Platform to provide data resilience for our business-critical on-premises environment.”

Veeam protects more than 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) at Sydbank, spanning data hubs, database clusters, and essential financial services applications. Immutable backups stored across two data centers give the bank confidence it can recover cleanly in any scenario.

“Veeam has adapted seamlessly as we have evolved our IT environment over time,” said Gildhoff. “The solution has never let us down; we have not experienced any downtime to our Veeam technology or issues with support. Veeam makes the complex simple. The highly intuitive interface allows us to apply sophisticated data resilience policies with ease.”

Sydbank is now harnessing built-in Veeam capabilities to help it navigate DORA compliance.

“Veeam helps us meet DORA requirements around verifying data integrity and speed of recovery,” said Gildhoff. “The ability to recover live from our storage system with Veeam is a really cool feature that makes our work so much easier.”

By empowering users, systems, and regulators with data as required, Veeam is powering success at Sydbank.

“We’re often asked to restore a file that they have deleted by accident, and it’s a simple task with Veeam,” said Gildhoff. “The beauty of Veeam is that we’re confident that the data we recover is clean and ready for use by the business. That means our risk calculations and other critical processes can carry on without interruption, helping Sydbank continue to bring great services to customers.”

• Delivers 24/7 data resilience and clean recovery for critical banking systems and applications
  Veeam has never let Sydbank down. The bank has not experienced any downtime due to Veeam or issues with Veeam support since the initial implementation many years ago.
• Simplifies DORA compliance
  Sydbank utilizes Veeam to meet requirements around data integrity and incident response, which reduces risk and boosts efficiency for the organization.
• Supports user productivity with rapid data recovery
  By enabling Sydbank to recover data cleanly and efficiently, Veeam provides solid foundations for the bank’s operations, which helps simplify the ongoing merger.