COUNTRY FOCUS: KENYA
Leading Kenyan investment
bank, Genghis Capital, decided to
think out of the box and turned
to Node Africa in order to take
advantage of the benefits that
the cloud brings.
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Kenyan investment bank
migrates 100% to the
cloud in one day
P
art of a strategic new direction,
Genghis Capital wanted to explore
the digital and productivity freedom
the cloud could offer and move away from
archaic systems that were proving to be a
stumbling block to innovation.
The task was no small feat for the
investment bank. Licensed Kenya’s Capital
Markets Authority (CMA) Genghis Capital
provides myriad financial services and
the bank falls under the jurisdiction of the
Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE Kenya),
meaning that every decision it made
pertaining to its infrastructure had to be
cleared by the NSE as well and guarantee
business continuity.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
“Our infrastructure had come to its end of
life, which was a huge challenge for the
business, but at the same time provided us
with a unique opportunity,” said Jeremiah
Chunge, Head of Alternative Channels and
Technology at Genghis Capital Limited. “We
had more than 11 servers that were starting
to cause disruptive full system reboots. Not
to mention that the cooling and electricity
costs of running them 24 hours a day were
just spiralling. Backups were also becoming
a problem to keep track of, as was our
ability to do fail overs. This was leading to
downtime and service disruption.”
The options facing the company were to
replace the old infrastructure or scale up
operations 100% into the cloud, where it could
then co-locate across different geographies.
“We began to investigate different options
in terms of their business efficiency and how
they could assist technical staff, who were
really running hard to keep the lights on,”
added Chunge.
“The team was already coming to work on
weekends and were always on call. Besides
just our servers, our PABX system couldn’t
deliver on collaborative tech like video
conferencing and call recording. In order to
transform the PABX we would have to invest
in new ‘video cards’ for the system – the
costs of which were just not justifiable.”
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