CASE STUDY
T
he Bank of Abyssinia (BOA) needed
to scale and improve both its
production and disaster recovery
environments, and be a more digitally
inclusive business, but was inhibited by
exorbitant costs of new equipment and long
delivery cycles.
Established in 1996, BOA is one of the largest
banks in Ethiopia, boasting over one million
customers and more than 5, 825 employees.
Its network stretches across the country with
286 branches; nearly half of which are in Addis
Ababa. In order to maintain a leadership
position, it places extensive emphasis on the
role of technology in the business.
“Our systems were becoming unstable and
the technology was gaining, so we identified
a need to update our production data centre
as well as improve our disaster recovery
environment,” said Yoseph Kibret, CIO at the
Bank of Abyssinia.
“Core to our customer service is innovation
through new services, one of which is looking
to create digital services, but we were unable
to achieve this as the technology we had in
place was outdated which was causing gaps
in the business.”
“Not only is infrastructure in Ethiopia
expensive as it is charged in dollars, but the
process to get equipment landed in country,
before we even deploy it, can take more than
six months – this makes it almost impossible
for a business to scale. That, and that fact
that we are governed by compliance, makes
it difficult to deploy new systems.”
The bank is also currently exploring the
implementation of electronic payments,
moving away from a paper-based system.
Something it was unable to move on
because of a legacy technology environment
that was stifling the process.
The bank issued an RFP to explore the
different options available to meet its needs.
BOA first explored replacing its existing
systems with a virtual solution but based on
respondents, wasn’t sure if the continuation
of a physical environment, or the adoption
of a hyperconverged infrastructure, would
best meet its goals.
“We selected WebSprix/ASA Trading as our
partner in this project and working with
OUR PRIMARY CONCERN IS ALWAYS
TO PROVIDE CONSISTENT, STABLE
CUSTOMER SERVICES AND SECURITY
OF DATA.
them we eventually identified the flexibility
offered by VMware and its vSAN solution
in a hyperconverged setup as the right
fit for us, in order to ensure we remained
compliant, but create the agility our
business craved to move with the times,”
said Kibret.
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After selecting a technology partner, a
vendor and a solution, the bank set about
building the new data centre based on
hardware servers configured with all-flash
HCI, connecting the network, ensuring
connectivity, preparing the facilities including
the prepping of generators to support should
there be a power failure. The infrastructure
component of the project took just over
three months, before the deployment of
vSAN could begin.
The footprint of the new and overhauled
environment for its production and disaster
recovery sites has reduced significantly,
and is now made up of a footprint of a six
node all-flash environment with a 48 TB
storage capacity for the primary production
environment, and a four node all-flash
environment with 32TB of storage in its
secondary site. The systems, hosted 100%
on vSAN, are running all of BOAs core
banking systems and enterprise applications.
“Our primary concern is always to provide
consistent, stable customer services and
security of data, including compliance, so the
environment had to adhere to the regulators
requirements placed on us,” added Kibret.
“The vSAN component of the system was
up and running in only three and a half
months, and in that time, we migrated
all of our critical core banking and card
banking applications, our database,
Internet and mobile banking, email, Active
Directory environment, our service desk and
management system. All of this happened
seamlessly. Now if I want to add a server or
a business application, I can immediately
provision it from the data centre, even the
disk and memory provisioning happens at
software layer and is instant. Our experience
has been really good and the flexibility
we have in our day-to-day operations is
incredible. The support I have received from
VMware and my partner WebSprix has been
excellent and they have provided consistent
knowledge transfer throughout.”
BOA has accelerated its business away
from a siloed approach, which previously
complicated the management of its systems,
and can now manage a single environment
improving support times immensely.
From a physical footprint point of view
the company previously had ‘a room full
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