KBank From Thailand Chooses Veeam Availability Suite

Kasikornbank Public Company Limited (KBank), a Forbes Global 2000 company and one of the largest  banks in Thailand, has replaced its legacy backup solution with Veeam Availability Suite.

Veeam 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. It also supports compliance with data privacy regulations from the Bank of Thailand, and it saves 900 administrative hours each month and $70,000 in IT costs each year.

“Digital transformation is a business priority for KBank,” said Surapan Chaimahapruek, assistant MD, 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.“

The legacy solution presented an additional challenge. It was agent-based, so IT administrators spent up to 4 months 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. Chaimahapruek said coordinating agent upgrades was difficult and time-consuming.

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,” Chaimahapruek said.

Veeam backups 2PB across 1,800 VMs and 120 physical machines to HPE StoreOnce in a secure onsite cloud. StoreOnce replicates data to a separate site for regulatory compliance and DR. Because Veeam integrates with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, backup is fast and reliable, and recovery take minutes – not hours like the legacy solution.

Chaimahapruek said Instant VM Recovery and Veeam Explorers for Oracle and 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.

“Veeam has dramatically improved operational efficiency,” Chaimahapruek continued. “It also helps us resolves IT issues proactively. Veeam provides visibility through monitoring, reporting and capacity planning, enabling us to protect the business by resolving an issue before it develops into a problem.“

Protecting the business is critically important, so administrators also use Veeam Staged Restore to scan backups for malware before restoring them. Chaimahapruek said next they’re considering Veeam’s hardened Linux repository for immutable backups to increase ransomware protection, and they’ll test Veeam CDP to improve resiliency among critical workloads. They’re also interested in container capabilities that Kasten, the technology company acquired by Veeam Software, offers for Kubernetes backup and DR.

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

Case study: Veeam helps KBank save 900 hours and $70,000 in IT costs