Thailand’s Kasikornbank (KBank) has tied up with Veeam to implement a new data backup solution.
Under the agreement, the bank’s tech subsidiary, Kasikorn Business - Technology Group (KBTG), will use Veeam’s solutions to transform KBank into a digital-first bank.
The Veeam availability suite combines the company’s data monitoring tool Veeam ONE with the data protection features of Veeam backup and replication in an enterprise bundle.
With the new solution, KBank will save around 900 administrative hours each month and US$70,000 in IT costs each year, KBTG’s assistant managing director Surapan Chaimahapruek said.
It will also help the company comply with the data privacy regulations of the Bank of Thailand, he added.
KBank, formerly the Thai Farmers Bank, was set up in 1945 and is one of the biggest banks in Thailand.
It is a Forbes global 2000 company with 16.5 million customers and employs more than 19,000 people.
KBTG was set up in 2016 by the KBank “to navigate the digital world, design state-of-the-art technologies and develop mobile applications” of which the most widely used is the mobile banking app, K Plus.
Key priority
Chaimahapruek said digital transformation is a key business priority for the KBank as it “strives to be the most innovative, proactive and customer-centric financial institution in Asia”.
Explaining why the bank switched from its legacy backup system to Veeam, Chaimahapruek said one critical requirement for digital transformation is modern data protection.
“The bank’s legacy backup solution wasn’t capable” as it required us to “manually verify the success or failure of every back-up and re-run the failed ones”, he said.
Recovery was also difficult and slow and in certain cases, the bank "had to spend more than four hours recovering a single database, which didn’t meet business or regulatory requirements”, he said.
Chaimahapruek added that since the legacy system was agent-based, IT administrators spent up to four months installing, maintaining and patching agents in individual systems and applications.
He added that since systems and applications run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the administrators had to request downtime for each system and coordinating upgrades was difficult and time-consuming.
Chaimahapruek said robust information systems are a requirement when managing customer relationships.
They also drive payment processing systems that let customers pay bills and also business intelligence tools to analyse data in order to develop enhanced digital offerings, he added.
Veeam backs up two petabytes (PB) of data across 1800 virtual machines and 120 physical machines to HPE StoreOnce in a secure onsite cloud.
“StoreOnce replicates data to a separate site for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery," Chaimahapruek added.
