Veeam helps KBank save 900 hours and $70,000 in IT costs

The Business Challenge

Kasikornbank (KBank) strives to be the most innovative, proactive and customer-centric financial institution in Asia. It provides world-class banking services and sustainable value for all stakeholders by harmoniously combining technology and talent.

To keep pace with technology innovation, KBank created Kasikorn Business Technology Group (KBTG) to navigate the digital world, design state-ofthe- art technologies and develop mobile applications to support the bank’s customer-centric model. The most widely used application is K PLUS. It lets customers access their accounts, make payments, transfer funds and manage their investments quickly, easily and safely from anywhere. K PLUS processes 100 million digital transactions daily.

“Digital transformation is a business priority for KBank,” said Surapan Chaimahapruek, Assistant Managing Director at KBTG. “One critical requirement for digital transformation is modern data protection, but the bank’s legacy backup solution wasn’t capable. Backup required us to manually verify the success or failure of every backup and rerun the failed ones. Recovery was another issue. It was difficult and slow. In certain cases, we could spend more than four hours recovering a single database, which didn’t meet business requirements or support regulatory requirements.”

The legacy solution presented an additional challenge. It was agent-based, so IT administrators spent up to four months installing, maintaining and patching agents in individual systems and applications. Systems and applications run 24/7, so administrators had to request downtime for each one. Chaimahapruek said coordinating agent upgrades was difficult and time-consuming.

Systems and applications are at the core of KBank’s business operations. A customer information system helps employees manage customer relationships, a payment processing system lets customers pay bills and business intelligence tools analyze data used to develop and enhance digital offerings.

“Digital transformation requires modern data protection, so we replaced the legacy solution with Veeam Availability Suite,” Chaimahapruek said. “Veeam not only modernizes data protection, but it also ensures consistency of data protection and improves operational efficiency because it’s reliable and easy to use.”

The Veeam Solution

Veeam supports compliance with data privacy regulations from the Bank of Thailand, and it helps the bank save 900 administrative hours each month and $70,000 in IT costs each year.

“Veeam is a cost-effective and robust solution and requires far less operational effort than legacy backup,” Chaimahapruek said. “Veeam’s product maturity and commitment to the industry are admirable.”

Veeam backs up 2 PB across 1,800 virtual machines (VMs) and 120 physical machines to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) StoreOnce in a secure onsite cloud. StoreOnce replicates data to a separate site for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery (DR). Because Veeam integrates with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, backup is fast and reliable, and recovery take minutes — not hours like the legacy solution.

Chaimahapruek said Instant VM Recovery and Veeam Explorers for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are among administrators’ favorite features because they reduce recovery time by 300%. Another favorite is Veeam DataLabs because administrators can create isolated environments to verify the recoverability of backups (SureBackup) and replicas (SureReplica) for regulatory compliance. Before deploying Veeam, verifying recoverability for compliance took months, but now it takes one week.

“Veeam has dramatically improved operational efficiency,” Chaimahapruek continued. “It also helps us resolves IT issues proactively. Veeam provides visibility through monitoring, reporting and capacity planning, enabling us to protect the business by resolving an issue before it develops into a problem.”

Protecting the business is critically important, so administrators also use Veeam Staged Restore to scan backups for malware before restoring them. Chaimahapruek said they’re considering Veeam’s hardened Linux repository for immutable backups to increase ransomware protection, and they’ll test Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP) to improve resiliency among critical workloads. They’re also interested in container capabilities that Kasten, the technology company acquired by Veeam Software, offers for Kubernetes backup and DR.

“There are so many ways Veeam improves efficiency to save time, but it also saves money,” Chaimahapruek said. “Integration with HPE StoreOnce increases our deduplication ratio to 4:1, which saves on backup storage, and Veeam saves on annual licensing costs too.”

Results

• Protects the data required to build the digital bank of the future
  KBTG is turning the digital bank of the future into reality for KBank, and Veeam is protecting the data that supports the process, giving millions of customers the ability to access financial services at any time and from anywhere.
• Supports data privacy compliance regulations from the Bank of Thailand
  Veeam supports compliance by verifying the recoverability of backups and replicas. Before deploying Veeam, verifying recoverability for compliance took months, but now it takes a week.
• Saves 900 administrative hours monthly and $70,000 in IT costs annually
  Veeam improves operational efficiency while decreasing costs for backup storage and licensing.