With Qatar International Islamic Bank needing to ensure the 24.7.365 availability of critical data, it turned to Veeam to over come the challenges of slow backup and recovery. QIIB replaced its legacy backup system with Veeam Availability Suite with the benefit of increased backup and recovery speed.
Qatar International Islamic Bank (QIIB) remains true to its Qatari heritage and values. QIIB’s family-friendly attitude and personal approach are just a few of the many reasons customers choose QIIB as a banking partner for their personal and business needs.
QIIB offers innovative banking solutions based on customers’ needs, including mobile, Internet and phone banking. The goal is to provide efficient transactional banking and a positive customer experience.
This puts QIIB right in line with global banking trends. In a survey of international banking leaders conducted by the Digital Banking Report, improving the customer journey and providing a positive customer experience was ranked as the number one trend, as well as the top strategic priority.
To improve the customer journey, QIIB continually develops new banking services that are fast, easy and seamless to use, such as Western Union transfers and a voice-activated system that lets customers reset personal identification numbers (PINs) for their debit cards. Before launching new services, QIIB tests them for six to eight months.
The test environment makes up 60% of QIIB’s IT infrastructure, and the production environment, which supports all banking operations, comprises 40%. Critical data in both environments must be available 24.7.365 for QIIB to provide efficient transactional banking and a positive customer experience. Slow back-up and recovery of critical data put the IT team on high alert.
“Slow backup and recovery made it challenging for us to ensure critical data was available at all times,” said Nasser Hasan Mahmoud, Chief Information Officer at QIIB. “How could we tell the executive team that slow backup and recovery might delay the testing and launch of a new service or prevent customers from completing their mobile transactions?”
The solution
QIIB replaced legacy backup with Veeam Availability Suite. One year later, QIIB received a Banking Excellence Award from the World Union of Arab Bankers for excellence in straight-through transactional processing.
“Veeam was definitely one of the reasons we won this award,” Mahmoud said. “Backup speed increased by 75% and recovery speed increased by 92% thanks to integration between Veeam and Dell EMC VNX, our primary storage.”
Veeam delivers 24.7.365 availability of QIIB’s critical data, enabling the bank to provide customers with fast, efficient banking solutions and a positive banking experience.
“Veeam helps us deliver seamless, personalised service to customers, and Veeam supports the development and testing of new banking products,” Mahmoud said. “We learned this very quickly during Veeam’s proof of concept.”
During the proof of concept, Veeam dramatically improved recovery speed of the bank’s virtual machines. QIIB restored them from a backup in three hours. Mahmoud said restoring them with legacy backup would have taken three days.
“That’s when we knew Veeam was the best solution for us,” Mahmoud said. “If we hadn’t been using Veeam at the time, we might have lost part of our testing environment, which would have delayed each product launch by at least one month. That’s bad for the business and our customers.”
Veeam has also proven to be user-friendly and has made the company more efficient.
“Veeam is so easy to use and so reliable that we no longer need a full-time backup administrator,” Mahmoud said. “Our backup administrator spends less than half his time on backup because of Veeam, so he spends the rest of his time on server and storage maintenance.”
Veeam also saves on agent fees. By replacing legacy backup with Veeam, QIIB saved significant money.
Mahmoud said the bank has full confidence in Veeam.
“Veeam instils confidence immediately,” he said. “We know our critical data is being backed up quickly and reliably, and we know we can recover from our backups. Veeam makes life easier.”
Mahmoud listed the following as results of the solution:
• It delivers 24.7.365 availability of critical bank data. Personal banking doesn’t end when the business day ends. Veeam helps QIIB provide customers with fast, efficient, on-demand banking solutions at all times.
• It supports new product development, test and launch plans to improve the customer experience, QIIB continually develops and tests new banking services. Veeam makes sure that data is available continuously so launch plans stay on track.
• It saves significant time and money
“The biggest benefit of using Veeam is 24.7.365 availability, but saving time and money is a nice bonus,” Mahmoud said.
