COUNTRY FOCUS: LEBANON
When BLC Bank
decided to virtualise
85% of its environment,
poor performance of its
existing backup system
presented risk and compliance
concerns. To ensure integrity of
vital customer and operations
data, and the availability of
critical banking services, the
company needed to drastically
reduce the time required
for backup and recovery of
applications and data.
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Banking on availability
E
xceptional customer service has always
been a defining characteristic of the
banking industry and in recent years,
technology advances have made it possible
for banks to redefine customer experience
using digital channels.
Every new service – from telephone and
Internet banking to mobile applications – has
been eagerly received and rapidly adopted by
customers who view these as essential.
Such technology-readiness has allowed BLC
Bank to innovate and differentiate itself
from the competition, but Georges Deaibess,
Head of Infrastructure Management and
48
INTELLIGENTCIO
Database Administration, at BLC Bank
remains mindful that this advantage can
only be maintained when services meet
extremely high availability expectations.
“Having become accustomed to the
convenience of ATMs, and services such as
Internet and mobile banking, customers
now expect to access their financial data
and transact anywhere and at any time. We
simply cannot afford any downtime in the
underlying data and applications that power
these services,” he said.
For a bank, any failure to achieve total
availability can result in a direct loss in the
revenue, reputation, and the consequential
loss of customers: “If a single service is
not available, it’s equivalent to our bank
being closed during working hours which is
unacceptable,” explained Deaibess. “And it
isn’t just our customers who are impacted –
employees across all departments, including
finance, support, sales and management, are
heavily reliant on IT and will not be able to
perform their functions if the applications and
data they utilise daily become unavailable.”
Knowing this, Deaibess lacked confidence
that his bank’s existing backup solution
could meet expectations as his team began
to move forward with virtualisation.
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