How a cloud provider ensures DR Readiness for its banking customers

C-Edge Technologies is a provider of cloud based financial services technology and claims to offer diversified and customized solutions like Core Banking Solutions, Channel Solutions, Compliance Solutions and Payment Solutions. One of C-Edge's core strength lies in providing Core Banking Services on an innovative Application Service Provider (ASP) model to various Urban, District Cooperative and Regional Rural banks in India. Its ASP model combines IT services, networking and core banking application infrastructure in a bundle, enabling banks to run efficiently and in a cost effective manner.

Ensuring Business Continuity for its customers

As more and more banks are adopting C-Edge's ASP model, all the banks have a common requirement i.e. to be able to manage unprecedented number of transactions 24x7. C-Edge, being responsible for end to end managed services for all the banks, was faced with the challenge of safeguarding and ensuring the business continuity of all IT systems so that its customers constantly operate without disruption in their banking operations. One of the key steps to ensure business continuity which the company took was to transform its disaster recovery processes, landscape along with automation.

C-Edge has three datacenter sites operating at geographically dispersed locations. C-Edge initiated IT BCP/DR project with the objective to resume business services from DR site (within stipulated RTO) and ensuring data recovery within defined RPO.

In this context, C-Edge faced a host of challenges:

• There was a lack of real time visibility into key DR metrics: RPO and RTO
• The challenges related to conducting the DR drill included:

1. DR Drill was manual, error-prone and time consuming
2. There was a great dependence on application/database/Infrastructure Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to perform DR drill
3. Due to dependence on SMEs, effort intensiveness of DR Drill process, it was not feasible to perform DR drill for multiple banks

• Manual monitoring of data lag between production and remote site for all critical applications
• There was no real time alerts/notification and event- generation mechanism on potential delays and failure to meet SLAs
• Preparation of DR reports was a time consuming activity and subject to heavy dependency on availability of SME

Solutions

C-Edge was in search of a technology partner that could help in DR transformation. One of C-Edge's key requirements was to perform DR drills simultaneously for various banks with minimal amount of resources on a regular basis. This requirement played a key role in C-Edge's process of vendor and product evaluation. After thorough evaluation, C-Edge chose Sanovi's Cloud Continuity software for transforming its DR. Sanovi Cloud Continuity software enabled C-Edge to offer a unified disaster recovery management service that delivers real-time DR readiness validation, reporting and execution, offering tangible business and operational advantages to its banking customers. By deploying Sanovi Cloud Continuity software, C-Edge now ensures recovery readiness of core banking and other critical financial applications that it offers to its customers. “We find immense value in partnering with Sanovi to guarantee our critical services are available and recovery-ready. Sanovi's Cloud Continuity software has enabled C-Edge to perform automated disaster-recovery drills for multiple customers, whilst still meeting stringent recovery times defined in Service-Level Agreements. I look forward to our continued partnership with Sanovi in meeting the demanding application continuity needs of our customers,” said K Krishna Kumar, CEO – C-Edge Technologies.

Salient features of the solution provided by Sanovi include:

• Comprehensive DR life-cycle monitoring and management capability, including ability to validate, automate and report on application recovery
• Single console to manage application recovery
• Monitor recovery SLA – Meet RPO, RTO SLAs by monitoring the solution and get automated alerts when deviations occur
• Pre-packaged Best Practices workflow for Single-Click recovery execution
• DR Solution Templates ensure Recovery Readiness through large scale DR drill for several banks simultaneously
• Massive reduction in dependence on experts, time and cost for conducting DR Drills

Benefits:

Implementing Sanovi Cloud Continuity software enabled C-Edge to achieve disaster recovery transformation in the form of a scalable, self service- based and cost-effective solution across heterogeneous environments with the following benefits:

• Sanovi Cloud Continuity Software enabled C-Edge to execute large scale DR drill for 49 banks simultaneously with a single-click. Such large scale DR drill was not possible prior to this
• C-Edge achieved over 80% reduction in DR drill window (i.e., total time required to bring down production services, perform the switchover of one application, database and network to DR site, start application services from DR is 5-10 minutes with Sanovi as against 60-75 minutes without Sanovi)
• There was a ten-fold increase in number of DR drills performed with no increase in staff (i.e., three resources required for performing DR drill per bank without Sanovi as against three resources for DR drill for any number of banks through Sanovi)
• Sanovi Cloud Continuity Software enabled C-Edge to achieve regulatory compliance
• There was over 95% reduction in time taken to prepare DR reports: DR drill, Data lag, RPO, Group summary etc (i.e., total time required to download various DR reports on the fly through Sanovi is 5 minutes as against 4 hours manually without Sanovi)
• Real-time access to DR management dashboard and reports for C-Edge management team (manually there was no availability of dashboards and ready-made reports)
• Real-time visibility into RPO and RTO for each application and database, enabling C-Edge to take immediate corrective action, if SLAs were likely to be breached