In spite of war in Ukraine, the Bank for Investments and Savings is working like a clock, providing payments and clients’ access to their money. Such resilience stems from extensive IT-team work. GigaCloud cloud and Disaster Recovery service also helped with that.

Bank for Investments and Savings is a Ukrainian commercial bank. It has 34 branches in various regions of Ukraine. In 2021, Credit-Rating independent agency has confirmed the bank’s uaAA National rating scale (stable prognosis) and deposit reliability rating of 4+ (high reliability).

Bank for Investments and Savings network branch

Task

Bank for Investments and Savings (BISbank) has two in-house data centers, used to build a private cloud and host the company’s own IT-infrastructure. In order to protect critically important data from viruses, cyberattacks, employees’ human errors and other force majeures, technical experts have for long hosted backups in the GigaCloud VMware-based public cloud. This way, the bank saves its data not only in two data centers, but also encrypted in the cloud.

The issue of ensuring fault-free operation of the bank's IT infrastructure is nonetheless critical. Ultimately, all interaction with the client has switched online — to social networks, a website and mobile applications. The client wants to get help or services in a 24/7 format. There is virtually no time slot for technical work, updates, preventive work and equipment replacement, so the architecture must be able to work in such a way that, despite all the issues, the services for the client are available.

With the beginning of the russian invasion, the banking system was under threat. Therefore, the National Bank of Ukraine, the authority responsible for governing all the banks within Ukraine, provided new opportunities for banks to work in extremely difficult conditions. Its resolution tackled the use of the cloud by Ukrainian banks under martial law. Ukrainian banks received permission to store data in data centers within the EU. Since the entire Bank of Investments and Savings IT infrastructure was located in Kyiv, given the risks, specialists began to implement a business continuity plan prepared in advance — to build a fault-free solution in a safer place.

Opening of one of the Bank for Investments and Savings branches

Solution

The GigaCloud cloud operator has been an infrastructure partner for a long time and figured additional backup scenarios with the client in advance. Since the war outbreak, BISbank has rented a public cloud infrastructure on the VMware platform, located at one of the sites in the western availability zones. On its basis, the bank's IT team together with GigaCloud specialists built a DRaaS solution. Now all the Bank for Investments and Savings services are backed in the cloud. In case of failure of both physical data centers of the bank, it will be able to continue its work on the virtual site without downtime.

Migration to the cloud took place during the fiercest phase of the war. It took a week to construct a DRaaS solution from scratch. GigaCloud specialists helped the bank's technical specialists perform all the necessary work around the clock.

Bank for Investments and Savings team

Result

Andriy Balanda, Head of IT at the Bank for Investments and Savings, highlights several main advantages of using the GigaCloud public cloud:

• Confidence in the security and availability of data and services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• Ability to work without downtime during any force majeure.
• Speed and ease of setting up GigaTrans data transmission channels with branches, NBU and other partners with which the bank works. GigaCloud, together with the telecom operator GigaTrans, is part of the GIGAGROUP group of companies.
• Flexibility and speed of scaling.
• An opportunity for bank employees to access data and services from any gadget, anywhere in the world.

“An attack on the Ukrainian banking system is one of the goals of the Russian army,” says Andriy Balanda, Head of IT at the Bank for Investments and Savings. "In order to save the payment data of our customers and to be able to provide services, we decided to build a backup site for hosting our IT infrastructure in the GigaCloud cloud. And it was the right decision. We have known GigaCloud for a long time, we are positive about its reliability and expertise, so we are completely satisfied with the cooperation.”