63 Moons, formerly known as Financial Technologies India, provides technology solutions in the financial domain and creates innovative platforms for trading. Its flagship security trading platform, ODIN, holds around 80% of the market share in India. In recent times, the technology provider evaluated a business requirement of streamlining its data management and enhancing cybersecurity internally. The company started to look at different solutions and the cloud environment was one of the key priorities.Today, cloud technology has become imperative for improving business productivity and optimising costs. Businesses across industries are relying on cloud technology to improve their agility, speed, flexibility, and scalability.
63 Moons has several important applications such as CRM and ERP on the cloud. Therefore, the company was looking for a data management solution that can enhance the cybersecurity posture while delivering a flexible computing environment on cloud.
“We feel that the biggest threat to data security is an internal employee. Most errors happen due to human error. Now that we have to comply with ISO 27000 and ISO 20000, we need to ensure that humans become error-free. Then, we can move onto application-level security and perimeter-level security. Apart from data breaches, a cyberattack can lead to system downtime, which is unacceptable in this sector. Data must always be available with no exceptions. 63 Moons wanted to ensure the protection of customer data in this fast-evolving threat landscape,” Neehar Pathare, VP, ICT, and CISO, 63 Moons said.
Pathare and his team wanted to ensure that their data security and management is technically advanced, to withstand any critical security challenge while protecting data in the company.
Amid Covid-19, BFSI is observed to be one of the most critical and targeted sectors by hackers. Ransomware attacks, data breaches, malicious botnets, DDoS, etc have created havoc in the sector. This has been resonating with the companies such as 63 Moons which are servicing in this sector. Thus, the company was looking for improvements in its data backup and management. After evaluating multiple vendors and technology providers, Pathare chose Veeam to implement a data protection and management solution.
“Veeam has helped us in identifying malware while backups were still going on. This added another level of protection. Periodic health check-ups of backup files ensured that data was intact. With regular backup taking place daily, weekly, and monthly, it was guaranteed that backup schedules were intact. Moreover, the replication function enables better synchronization between production and DR sites so that the latest version is available,” Pathare added.
Pathare and his team worked with Veeam to ensure a full-proof data availability without any backup failure. Additionally, in the event of any ransomware or cybersecurity incident, the solution is developed in such a way that data can be restored successfully and quickly within the four-hour window that’s required for business continuity, compared to legacy solutions, which can take up to 24 hours.
“One of the best features is that during a restore, we have this function to manage the audit log for restoration. This allows us to check when the restore was taken. A hybrid cloud setup has its own set of challenges and we didn’t face any major pitfalls in our hybrid environment, and have achieved better data control and availability with support of Veeam,” Pathare highlighted.
Maintaining data security and compliance is the real challenge
Sensitive financial data needs to be protected and shared in a safe way that complies with the regulatory environment. According to Pathare, these laws are becoming increasingly stringent in light of rising cyber-attacks. With the integrity of data becoming paramount, ensuring 100% compliance with regulatory bodies is a must. While new regulations have driven up compliance costs, increased capital and liquidity requirements have reduced returns. Low-interest rates and limited revenue opportunities have further reduced returns on equity and led institutions to seek reduced operating costs, including reduced risk management costs.
“Since this financial crisis, institutes have faced a tsunami of new regulatory requirements. With data becoming the most important asset for businesses, availability is key. In fact, the biggest challenge for 63 Moons is to ensure that our data is always available securely to our customers,” Pathare added.
A multi-cloud approach is cost-effective
The company is computing in a multi-cloud environment and is currently migrating a few applications and VMs to it. Pathare feels that cloud is the core and key to every business looking at improving their data management.
“The biggest advantage is cost. With the cloud coming in, licensing costs go down. Also, the cloud allows users to pay as they grow. Therefore, we have started moving simple workloads like CRM applications, accounting, business continuity, collaboration, and even equity access to the cloud. Our entire Microsoft Office suite is now on the cloud, too. Following a multi-cloud setup, we use Azure, AWS, and Nutanix,” Pathare said.
Key post-deployment benefits
After implementing the data management solution, Pathare reveals that the company is now able to better integrate with VMware. Apart from major business benefits, he has also observed an improvement in productivity for the IT team.
Duplication and compression save a lot of storage space. We have achieved over 90% compression and have reduced the entire backup window from 18 hours to six hours. Restoring time is also improved and is way faster than before.
“With more and more features getting built-in at regular intervals, we know that our decision of choosing Veeam is right. We have a modern data protection and management solution in place which maintains data availability and security. This investment has been beneficial for the business and overall the solution was easy to implement, use and cost-effective,” Pathare concluded.
