Modernizing banking operations for resiliency and readiness to deliver new services

Large South Asian Bank |  Banking and financial services

 

Business opportunity

System failures and security breaches top the list of what keeps C-suite leaders up at night. Because even with safeguards in place, disruptions can and do occur.

It happened to one of the world’s largest banks, when power and cooling systems failed in a primary datacenter and disaster recovery did not execute as planned. The result: customers were locked out of essential services for four days.

In response, the bank’s CEO doubled down on IT innovation. His team’s plan to modernize operations not only would protect against future outages but also set a foundation for delivering more personalized financial services to customers in the near future.

Technical challenge

First, to protect the bank’s customers and business from follow on outages, the team needed to very quickly move infrastructure to a new datacenter. Then, they needed to implement a new disaster recovery solution.

That new solution would provide both end-to-end resilience across datacenters and prepare the IT estate for new banking services. To implement it, the team needed to carefully integrate systems that had been put in place and managed by a variety of previous vendors during the bank’s years of rapid growth.

Based on trust in a 10+ year relationship, the bank selected Kyndryl as their long-term partner to help achieve the bold dual purpose.

 

 

Based on trust in a 10+ year relationship, the bank selected Kyndryl as their long-term partner to help achieve the bold dual purpose.

 

Our solution

Together, the bank’s technical leaders and Kyndryl designed the plan to modernize operations. Strategically, Kyndryl would immediately take the lead on two things:

  1. Assessing the existing network, recommending updates, and implementing and managing the new architecture.
  2. Assessing, recommending and implementing a reliable, new disaster recovery solution.

Within 6 months, Kyndryl conducted a first successful disaster recovery test between the new datacenters. The team stood up the bank’s new Network Operations Center (NOC) and soon after integrated Kyndryl Bridge, which provides the bank’s IT team with better control of systems remotely and on the floor of the datacenters, increasing the efficiency of resolving incidents across the IT estate.

 

 

What progress looks like

  • 20+ successful disaster recovery tests conducted within the first year have proven the new solution’s reliability.
  • A new network operations center (NOC) with end-to-end visibility into current events gives the team time and focus needed to execute system recovery either separately or all together.

Innovations underway:

  • A project to fully automate disaster recovery switchovers.
  • A project to expand Kyndryl Bridge integration to include AI-driven predictive capabilities through access to a large database that condenses lessons learned from decades of Kyndryl customer engagements

Need a digital version of this story?

Download pdf

Meet the team

Dhyanesh Thakkar

Account Partner, Kyndryl

Sankar Chakrabarti

Delivery Partner, Kyndryl

Kalyan Mukhopadhyay

Consult Partner, Kyndryl

Sainath Iyer

Director, Delivery Management, Kyndryl

What’s your next digital business challenge? Let’s tackle it together.

Start a conversation

More IT modernization stories

Arizona MVD

Arizona Motor Vehicle Department dramatically reduces average time of customer visits to Motor Vehicle Division offices with self-service options on a fast network connecting to cloud-based systems.

State Public Transportation Services

State Public Transportation agency collaborated with Kyndryl to close its aging data center and introduce a consumption-based multi-cloud environment to reduce costs, inform critical decision-making on operational priorities, and address ambitious sustainability goals.

Kantar

Kantar and Kyndryl created a new IT program, including a cloud-first architecture, a helpdesk servicing 26,000 in many languages, and an engineering-centered culture