Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 44 | Page 50

COUNTRY FOCUS: LEBANON and services such as Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange and Active Directory that are essential to internal stakeholders: “Veeam gives us confidence that these mission- critical services for both customers and employees are always available,” said Deaibess. Backing up the 27Tb of data generated by these services now requires under 10 hours, representing a 60% reduction compared to the old solution. Complete VM recovery – which previously took up to a day – is now possible in fewer than 15 minutes. Offering an example of how this dramatic improvement ‘saved the day’ for his organisation, Deaibess said: “A few months ago, due to a Windows update, a VM running a financial reporting application crashed. This is a service that enables our accounting and operations department to prepare the daily reports mandated by the Central Bank which must be submitted by a fixed time each day. “Were it not for Veeam’s solution, which permitted us to recover the service in a matter of mere minutes, we would have missed this deadline and faced hefty financial penalties.” Veeam’s file level recovery is another powerful feature that directly enhances customer experience by enabling rapid resolution of a frequent issue. “Emails are often unintentionally deleted which pertain to customer requests or concerns, hence rapid recovery becomes imperative,” said Deaibess. Veeam delivers the ability to rapidly search through terabytes of data and recover individual files without loading the entire backup. “Our customer support team in particular has found this especially helpful as we can quickly provide them with the entire communications history of a customer,” he added. As the Active Directory is backed up by Veeam, the bank has been able to leverage application item recovery for security and compliance purposes as well. Deaibess said: “If an employee or partner claims their security privileges have been 50 INTELLIGENTCIO “ The results: CUSTOMERS NOW EXPECT TO ACCESS THEIR FINANCIAL DATA AND TRANSACT ANYWHERE AND AT ANY TIME. • Aids hyper-availability of mission-critical banking data and services through Intelligent Data Management Veeam’s solution plays a major role in ensuring customers always have access to vital services including account data, ATMs and mobile banking. The bank’s internal functions such as sales and customer support are also empowered by the rapid availability of data, enabling them to better serve customers. changed, I can easily browse the backups and verify their claims.” • Ensures regulatory compliance and reduces IT team’s workload by 30% By eliminating the need for manual backup verification and simplifying solution management, Veeam has reduced the time the IT team spends on these tasks by over 30%. “For compliance, we must verify all our backups and now thanks to Veeam, this process has been entirely automated,” said Deaibess. “Assurance of the integrity and availability of data – on which nearly every operation in our bank is reliant – gives every stakeholder immense peace of mind.” • Enables fact-based forecasting, ensuring services always match customer quality of service (QoS) expectations Using Veeam ONE, BLC Bank can track trends and pre-empt the need for additional compute resources. “It gives us a clear picture of how our environment is being utilised. Using this insight, we make informed decisions regarding infrastructure investments which ensures the service we deliver to our customers remains consistently high quality,” said Deaibess. n Deaibess went on to state that Veeam ONE delivers ‘crystal clear’ monitoring and reporting, and that the self-explanatory reports it generates can be easily interpreted by external partners during compliance audits. Granular visibility across his entire virtual environment lets Deaibess know the exact utilisation of all servers and storage. “We can track trends and pre-empt the need to add resources so there’s never a drop in the quality of service we deliver to customers,” he said. “Such fact-based forecasting is vital to IT budget planning and is greatly appreciated by management.” “In addition to streamlining processes, enhancing security, aiding compliance and being an enabling component of the hyper-availability of critical services, Veeam has reduced my team’s efforts in achieving these objectives by 30%. We’re already considering expanding Veeam to our physical environment, so all our banking services and data can be assured by the confidence that Veeam delivers.” www.intelligentcio.com