IBS Journal March 2017
31
It’s fundamental that security sits front and centre in our information systems for us to keep the trust and confidence of our customers.
Another ongoing challenge is the sheer volume of data we deal with, which continues to grow. In fact, we’ve seen a 30% increase year-on-year in the amount of data we’re handling. With such drastic increases, our infrastructure was under pressure. Making data available for analysis was taking much longer and we were experiencing latency issues with some applications which were slowing down internal processes.
IBS Journal: How can data analytics help banks respond to the increasing threat posed by FinTechs and other new entrants?
BG: Data analytics has many benefits for banks, one of which is the spotting of potential security risks and threats. Part of a broader range of measures banks must take to identify and respond to security threats, data plays a powerful role in terms of monitoring for potential risks and keeping an eye on breach patterns.
IBS Journal: Could you tell us about the evaluation of different storage solutions and what led you to opt for Hitachi?
BG: When we began our search for a new storage solution we conducted a comprehensive evaluation. At the end of our several months-long benchmarking project, we decided we should replace our high-end storage tier with four Virtual Storage Platform G1000 (VSP G1000) systems from Hitachi. We’re using this platform with a range of software from Hitachi, including storage virtualisation OS, command suite analytics, local replication and remote replication software.
We chose this solution because it ranked highly across all our criteria, including remote response time, and the Hitachi VSP G1000 price was very competitive. We run all applications centrally and then use them from branches and offices, so this was important.
IBS Journal: What has been the outcome?
BG: With the new solution from Hitachi Data Systems we’re able to power our mission critical applications, including Equation Branch Automation using SQL and e-bank information systems for retail and corporate banking. Other
applications include the K&H Bank and Insurance websites, latency-sensitive virtual machines running VMware, Oracle Database with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Data Guard.
We’ve been able to rework our data daily loading processes. Previously, our data analysts had to wait two days for new business figures to become available in our data warehouse. This has now been reduced to a day. So we are able to analyse our data much faster which in turn enables us to make better decisions and react more quickly to market changes and trends.
We’ve also been able to change our back-up and recovery processes to take advantage of storage snapshot technology. By using snapshot technology we’ve cut recovery times by 50%; from 30 hours to 15 hours. It’s now much easier for us to meet our recovery time objectives.
I should add that we’re also leveraging the snapshot feature to provision test and development systems much more quickly than we could before. Our developers can now start using a new instance the same day as they request it – this is something which would not have been possible before the upgrade. The new user interface is easy for storage administrators to use, system management has been streamlined and productivity has been boosted.
IBS Journal: Looking to the future, how will the Hitachi solution help you move towards greater digitalisation?
BG: Since deployment, we’ve been able to scale and adapt the solution and have subsequently acquired another two systems. We’re also planning to deploy Hitachi Accelerated Flash to improve the performance of our database systems. This flash technology features high-speed data compression so that we can make effective use of our additional capacity.
It’s our aim to move the company towards greater digitalisation, an area in which Hitachi has been a strong partner to us. We think that standardising the environment across the group companies will make training easier as operations and support engineers will be able to learn from eachother. It should mean that storage administrators will be able to work across datacentres and even countries to make sure that we get the best use out of our infrastructure and minimise any disruption.
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