Premier Bank Reduces Data Backup and Recovery Time by One Third with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Premier Bank offers a wide array of banking services through its network of 111 branches and 70 agent points across the country. Its customers use Internet banking, SMS banking, agent banking, ATM, POS, eCommerce, etc. to access these services. Driven by the bank’s core value of ‘Service First’, the IT team is tasked with ensuring that all these banking facilities are available real time to its 4,00,000-plus customers without any disruption.

The bank is 100% reliant on its data being available 24X7 to continue providing all the banking services without disruption. However, the bank’s existing set-up was not conducive to business’ zero tolerance for downtime in data availability. It was using manual and Oracle built-in features for monitoring, reporting and capacity planning. Because of this, their data was scattered and lacked the organization and structure critical for security and compliance.

Md. Mashuqur Rahman, the Senior Vice President and Head of IT for Premier Bank Ltd., is responsible for the bank’s IT operations and was facing the unique challenge of providing data Availability assurance to the bank so it can serve their customers efficiently.

To restore any amount of data, Premier Bank had to wait at least five to six days for their data to be recovered. In addition, their daily total data backup process would take 13 working days with huge, costly external storage devices. At the end, despite all their efforts, Premier Bank’s backup data assurance was non-existent.

“In today’s fast-paced, technology-driven banking sector, even the slightest downtime can bring the bank’s operations to a halt, adversely impacting customers as well as our brand value and reputation. We needed a reliable backup and availability solution that would address the data loss risks and give us the confidence of protecting our data and making it available to the business 24X7,” said Rahman. 

The Veeam solution 

Md. Mashuqur Rahman evaluated the various data management solutions on the market based on several key parameters before deciding to go with Veeam Availability Suite, as it proved to be the right fit for all the bank’s requirements.

“Veeam Availability Suite provides a single solution for backup, replication and quick and effective recovery with less human interference. Veeam is also flexible, hypervisor-agnostic and provides capabilities for VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V, which is a benefit for us,” said Rahman.

The easy-to-use and cost-effective licensing also played a key role in Rahman’s decision to go for the Veeam solution.

“Veeam Availability Suite is an out-of-the-box solution with minimum independent hardware requirements and uses an easy and comfortable licensing policy to achieve our data management requirements, including unlimited data backup, replication, restoration, encryption and system Availability,” said Rahman.

Overall, Veeam’s global market status and the trust that Veeam has earned worldwide was a huge comforting factor in Rahman’s decision to go ahead and implement Veeam Availability Suite.

Veeam Availability Suite was implemented at Premier Bank’s data center in phases.

“The implementation was very smooth and seamless, with experts from Veeam visiting onsite for the necessary installation and handling the prerequisites remotely from their office,” said Rahman.

The results

Data Availability
With Veeam, Premier Bank has been able to achieve 24x7 data availability, enabling business continuity. This has given a major boost to the bank in terms of ensuring its services will always remain operational and available to customers without any disruption. 

“Fast point-in-time restores, instant boot-ups for any stored snapshot and smart replications with low recovery time objectives (RTO) have given us confidence for complete system and data. Now we can achieve the defined service level agreements (SLA) with businesses for availability,” said Rahman.

Data Protection
Besides availability, Premier Bank also benefited from the data protection offered by Veeam Availability Suite. 

“SureBackup ensures that backups are recoverable with no data loss, which is a great advantage of this system. ROI is improved with this cost-effective solution. In fact, we have minimized OPEX through this solution,” said Rahman. 

Faster
Backup and Recovery Veeam Availability Suite also helped Premier Bank save time with its much faster data backup and recovery. According to Rahman, before they implemented Veeam, it could take 13 days to assure data backup, whereas now, it takes almost one-third of that time. That too is being handled with just one or two resources for monitoring and managing. Premier Bank also has different frequencies for data backup (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, ad-hoc, etc.) In all cases, Veeam Availability Suite takes just one-third the time of legacy backup. Additionally, Veeam saves at least 65% on recovery times including lower recovery point objectives (RPO) and RTOs with Instant VM Recovery.

Automated
Rahman is particularly impressed with Veeam ONE, the automated monitoring and analytics console that provides automated data backup assurance and management reporting. 

“Veeam ONE’s fantastic reporting is helping us a lot with its automated management dashboard and daily performance monitoring. Due to its fully automated process, there is no human intervention required, allowing us to utilize our human resources for other more productive jobs,” said Rahman.

The monitoring capability of Veeam ONE has helped improve Premier Bank’s visibility over their infrastructure, enabling them to react to incidents faster than before. 

“We receive green-, red- and yellow-colored notification reports on a daily and weekly basis, helping our backup management team react instantly,” said Rahman.

Other key benefits of implementing Veeam Availability Suite include:

• Built-in and customized reporting and agentless granular recovery
• Compliance to all regulatory requirements
• Faster test environment creation with Veeam DataLabs
• Hardware-agnostic infrastructure • Data compression and encryption
• Additional restore points that help achieve minimum RPO and RTO for improved enterprise data availability