Veeam’s modern backup solution sees Thailand’s KBank saving 900 hours and US $70,000 in IT costs  

There is no denying that legacy backup solutions can still work for backup and recovery. However, in today’s fast-paced environment, the amount of time spent in backup and recovery can end up being a huge problem for most organizations.

According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is US $5,600 per minute in 2020. By now, the cost would be much higher given the increased adoption of digital services by most organizations.

Apart from the downtime cost, there is also the recovery time needed for organizations to get their business back up and running. In most industries, delayed recovery times can lead to high losses.

Even when it comes to scheduled downtime for maintenance and such, any delay would lead to serious consequences. For example, in industries like banking and finance, e-Commerce, and such, the time needed for planned and unplanned downtimes has led to customers moving to other alternatives.

In Thailand, Kasikornbank (KBank) had a legacy backup solution that was agent-based. IT administrators were challenged as they spent up to four hours 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.

To reduce their IT costs and save time, KBank opted for Veeam’s Modern Data Protection solution. The bank has replaced its legacy backup solution with Veeam Availability Suite. Veeam now protects data required by the bank’s technology subsidiary — Kasikorn Business Technology Group (KBTG) — to build the digital bank of the future for 16.5 million customers.

Since opting for a modern backup solution, KBank has saved 900 administrative hours each month and US $70,000 in IT costs each year. Veeam’s solution also supports compliance with data privacy regulations from the Bank of Thailand.

According to Surapan Chaimahapruek, Assistant Managing Director, 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.”

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, and 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. Veeam’s product maturity and commitment to the industry are admirable,” added Chaimahapruek.

Veeam backs up 2 petabytes 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. As Veeam integrates with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, backup is fast and reliable, and recovery takes minutes — not hours like the legacy solution.

Chaimahapruek also pointed out that 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.

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

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