Business opportunity
Losing access to digital banking is a distressing experience for customers. Downtime or degraded performance make them more likely to move to a competitor, and banks that fail to keep key systems available also face the risk of regulatory sanctions.
A fast-growing bank in South Asia recognized that it needed better protection against adverse events impacting its website, mobile apps and systems in its 900 branches – from simple hardware outages all the way up to natural disasters.
To help ensure business continuity as its business grew, the bank decided to refresh and upgrade its disaster recovery (DR) processes and practices.
Technical challenge
The bank’s primary and backup datacenters house around 2,000+ servers running more than 50 mission-critical applications. Given a complex web of hardware and software interdependencies, it was a huge – and largely manual – challenge for the bank’s IT staff to plan and test DR procedures and executions.
As the bank grew through acquisitions, the changing IT landscape added complexity and increased the inconsistencies between the two datacenters. DR runbooks were outdated, large teams of IT staff needed to be assembled for each DR test, and recovery times were long and unpredictable. As a result, the bank was challenged to meet its regulatory obligations.
Our solution
The bank engaged Kyndryl to analyze its existing DR environment and practices and design a solution to accelerate and de-risk recovery of more than 50% of its major applications along with the underlying infrastructure. Kyndryl Consult performed an IT Business Impact Analysis and Infrastructure Gap Analysis to identify the gaps in the bank’s current estate, datacenter and DR capacity, and DR capability risks. Kyndryl then mapped application interdependencies and created an actionable, fully documented DR plan.
Kyndryl deployed its Resiliency Orchestrator solution to provide a single-pane view of all DR elements and activities and designed automated workflows for switching groups of applications between the primary and backup datacenters. DR operations, including monitoring, drills and governance, are now successfully managed by Kyndryl.
