For a bank, there’s nothing more important than delivering an ‘always-on customer experience. However, most current technologies are inadequate in ensuring this. Periodic backups that only provide a snapshot in time are not compatible with demands for Recovery Time Objective (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objective (RPOs).Sankarson Banerjee, Chief Information Officer, RBL Bank believes that banks today have become a 24×7 business like e-commerce and the data & apps underlying the banks similarly needs to be always on. This has made modernising backup and storage strategy has been made a business priority.
Earlier, the concept of branches was predominant and there was relatively less interoperability. For a customer of a certain bank, all his/her operations used to be within that bank only. In case of a system error or other malfunctioning, the customer waits to do a transaction until the bank’s operations are up and running again.
Today, customers are doing lots of cross-bank transactions all the time. In a case where one bank’s services are down, it won’t just affect its own customer but also the one who is a customer of the other bank because the transaction won’t happen.
“It has become a much more interconnected system and has become one without any end of day or end of month concept. Everything has become real time and we have to adapt to make our data and applications available all the time,” said Banerjee.
Backup and recovery at the forefront of cloud adoption strategy?
Usually the backup requirements are of various types and there is no single answer to backup and storage, according to Banerjee.
First is where things need to be restored very quickly. Backups are made before updates and if that update goes wrong, the previous version has to be restored quickly.
There are backups that are done on a continuous basis that need to be stored for a longer-term.
“The long-term storage (more than 10 years or so) is not good for the cloud because it is relatively expensive. Outside storage, similar to a tape, is still by far the most cost-efficient and also most reliable method,” he added.
In some areas RBL is looking to move either to the cloud or the hard-disk storage.
“Of course in certain areas cloud storage is much more efficient than hard-disk premises. However, on-premise backups are more under your control and reliable, they are easier to offset, they are to keep secure for a longer period of time. With cloud it is easier to backup and add incremental storage but it is less obvious how to store it for a longer period of time,” said Banherjee.
He further raises a question that if a company is storing something for ten years, are you sure you will have a relationship with your cloud provider? “But the hard disks are your own property and will be there for a much longer period of time,” he maintained.
“As we go on, compute and data goes more on cloud, the primary backup goes more on cloud, and the instant restore versions also tend to go more on cloud,” he added.
Security against ransomware
As cyberattacks in India witnessed a massive spike in 2020, it has become even more crucial for BFSI tech leaders to protect their organisations from cyber attacks such as ransomware.
According to Banerjee, to tackle ransomware it is important to ensure clean backups which cannot be corrupted in case of a ransomware attack.
“This is done through multiple strategies. We have clean live backups and clean offsite backups. Offsite backups are easier to protect from ransomware but harder to restore. Even with online backups we are trying to get more ransomware centric by making one-way gates, by preventing backups from being infected by ransomware, by keeping many versions,” he averred.
