Veeam upgrades data protection for Kasikornbank in Thailand

Kasikornbank (KBank), 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. 

Veeam 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. 

Surapan Chaimahapruek, assistant managing director at KBTG, said the bank’s legacy backup solution required them to manually verify the success or failure of every backup and rerun the failed ones. Recovery was difficult and slow. In certain cases, they could spend more than four hours recovering a single database, which didn’t meet business requirements or support regulatory requirements.

The legacy solution was agent-based, so IT administrators spent up to four 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 analyse data used to develop and enhance digital offerings.

Veeam backs up 2 petabytes across 1,800 virtual machines and 120 physical machines to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) StoreOnce in a secure onsite cloud. StoreOnce replicates data to a separate site for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Because Veeam integrates with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, backup is fast and reliable, and recovery take minutes — not hours like the legacy solution.

“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.”