Pavel Yarmak, Head of the Server and Network Solutions Department at Seeton, explains how the "cloud transformation" was implemented in one of the major Ukrainian banks.
Ukrainian banks have traditionally always paid a lot of attention to ensuring disaster resistance, but mostly they were talking about classic solutions with minimal sufficient redundancy: one backup data center on the territory of Ukraine and/or storing cold copies of data on magnetic tapes. Although the issue of "cloud transformation" was considered, recognizing its future, but due to the overregulation of the market, these processes did not go beyond the scope of research. Some banks successfully experimented within the limits allowed, but more often they used services such as SaaS and PaaS. In addition, the bank's IT infrastructure is complex and often not easily adaptable to native cloud services.
With the outbreak of a full-scale war, Ukrainian companies were forced to quickly implement solutions that provide disaster resilience, cyber defense, and generally employee access to the necessary information systems. At the same time, many companies, including banks, did not have the opportunity to transfer all their IT services to foreign cloud resources. The reasons could be different: from technical dependence on land-based communication channels to regulatory norms prohibiting the transfer of personal data of Ukrainian citizens abroad.
The only achievable option for quickly solving the problem of reserving a critical part of the IT infrastructure was the use of IaaS and the creation of a hybrid earth-cloud model. This was also facilitated by the fact that cloud service providers offered a free trial period for using cloud resources and helped with basic settings.
The reservation formula has changed from "N+1" to "N+2", where the first backup data center is located in Ukraine, and the second is a data center in the cloud. At the same time, most process and technological solutions that successfully worked according to the "N+1" concept became incompatible with the new requirements.
Solution: Replication platform from Dell
In the course of communication with the customer-a large Ukrainian bank-several radically different solutions for disaster resilience were discussed: from creating a hybrid infrastructure based on the "ground-cloud" principle to synchronous and asynchronous data replication between ground and cloud data centers. Testing one of these solutions based on VMware technologies has shown that it is not yet possible to rebuild the infrastructure, coordinate all issues related to service cybersecurity, and seamlessly migrate services in 24 hours. Then the bank's management made a bet on the geographical separation of data between data centers in Ukraine with the possibility of data recovery in the cloud.
Considering key requirements of the customer, namely a possibility of data recovery at any time and dynamic switching of a role of the main of three DPCs separately for each service of bank, Seeton specialists offered the solution for data replication with the built-in mechanism of management of roles of DPCs based on the Dell RecoverPoint software (fig.). Dell company-the world leader in production of technology and services company that focuses its focus on customers, the use of advanced technologies, maintaining environmental sustainability and expanding its presence in the global market.
Fig. Diagram of the Dell RecoverPoint solution
After reviewing the design and capabilities of the technical solution, the bank set up a working group to discuss pilot testing. A week later, thanks to the help of Seeton and Dell specialists, everything was ready for testing on the basis of one of the bank's services. And three weeks later, after the relevant testing protocols were issued, all the bank's services were covered and synchronized between the three data centers.
"It's no secret that Dell has been a leader in building backup and data protection solutions for more than a decade. Its portfolio includes both software and hardware solutions that have no alternative in the world. Therefore, thanks to many years of experience working with the Seeton team, we were able to quickly implement one of our most affordable and reliable data replication solutions with a built-in data center role management mechanism.
Yuri Donchenko, Head of Backup and Data Protection Systems Development at Dell Technologies"
The customer separately notes that this made it possible to transfer one or another bank service to a backup or cloud data center and back without any problems, keeping within the allotted 15-minute time interval.
Seeton is ready to help build a disaster-proof infrastructure based on leading cloud backup solutions.
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