NAKIVO Ensures Continuity of Services for a Financial Institution
Business Challenge
ICFC Finance Limited is a financial institution in Nepal. The bank’s entire environment is virtualized on VMware vSphere. Currently, the bank has 2 physical servers in Nepal – one in Butwal and the other in Kathmandu. Altogether, 30 VMs run in the production environment. These VMs store all the financial transactions and customer-related critical information.
In general, backup and replication are crucial for avoiding downtime and ensuring uninterrupted business services and the continuity of financial services during an incident. Customer data is critical and must be protected at all times. Since the finance industry is regulated by the government, all financial transactions and activities must be stored in records. Without access to data, operating the banking business is impossible. Therefore, all data must always be available and accessible.
Previously, ICFC manually backed up and recovered data through a separate Windows backup solution. ICFC also tried and tested other backup and replication tools available on the market. As the IT team had to manually back up and recover all the data, and there was no option for setting up schedules for these tasks, the process was extremely tedious. The manual process was time-consuming and required manual work and effort to manage everything. Also, sometimes data was missing and not backed up thoroughly.
Thus, ICFC wanted to automate the whole data protection process and started to research VM backup solutions. The solution had to deliver ease of use, security, and scalability to ensure that the data could be accessible and available at all times. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been ICFC’s solution of choice since 2016.
Solution
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers a full range of data protection features, including backup, replication, instant granular recovery, and instant VM recovery. The solution is designed to simplify data protection with multiple administration and automation features. These features allow us to create automated workflows for backup, backup copy, and VM replication,” says Ronesh Chitrakar, IT Head at ICFC Finance Limited. “Also, we get a centralized view of all the past, current, and future activities to help avoid overlaps. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is one of the most affordable data backup and recovery solutions, with a flexible subscription and perpetual licensing model.”
“Within just two minutes, NAKIVO Backup & Replication was up and running and the web user interface allowed me to configure most of the parts easily. For the advanced settings, I followed the user guide. Also, the web interface is convenient for logging in and managing all the backups. We deployed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on one of our Synology NASs. This is great as we can manage and store backups in one place,” says Ronesh.
“We are impressed with the speed of NAKIVO Backup & Replication. It optimizes our backup process and ultimately completes the backup for our entire infrastructure in less than 30 minutes, which is faster than our initial expectations. Backup copy helps us multiply our backups and send them offsite or to other locations. Especially, as backup copies can be chained to the existing backup jobs, creating a great automated process,” says Rones.
“Site Recovery is also an impressive functionality that helps us design a plan and set actions to easily perform disaster recovery. The RTO of NAKIVO’s VM replication is as good as near-real-time. This is one of the most important factors, making our site recovery standards possible. With VM replication, we can easily replicate other hosts in a short period of time,” says Ronesh.
“The immutability functionality makes our data completely safe and gives us peace of mind as well as protects us from ransomware. With instant VM recovery, we can recover an entire VM instantly without downtime. Finally, IT monitoring gives us the ability to keep track of the performance of our VMware VMs. We can notice if any of the VMs are not healthy and take the necessary actions to prevent potential problems,” says Ronesh.
“NAKIVO’s technical support team always delivers prompt support, available 24/7 to help us resolve issues and emergency cases. We have had a great experience with the support team in several meetings, and the team is very patient in investigating issues to give us workable solutions,” says Ronesh.
Results
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication made our backup process efficient and fast. Therefore, the product saves us a ton of money we would have spent on engineering and IT infrastructure investments. Moreover, the product reduces the time and workload for our entire IT team,” says Ronesh, “The money NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped us save, would be measured by the money we would have spent on the additional resources for our IT systems and the money to rectify issues in case of data loss or downtime. Taking all of these factors into account, NAKIVO Backup & Replication saves us huge money compared to the previous approach with manual backup.”
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication is scalable and robust and has an easy setup with quick deployment and good technical support. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we achieved our RTO goal – which was not the case with our previous solutions. NAKIVO Backup & Replication ensures continuity of our financial services to our customers,” says Ronesh.
About ICFC Finance Limited
ICFC Finance Limited was registered in 2003 and started operating in 2004. Headquartered in Kathmandu, Nepal, ICFC has been promoted primarily to cater to the financial needs of small and medium enterprises. ICFC seeks to facilitate the increasing credit demands of its customers through innovative and sophisticated financial instruments through the state of the art technology and best international practices. For more information, visit www.icfcbank.com.