Today’s competitive banking landscape and mature customers demand world class services while ferocious competition stresses the need for service differentiation. Soneri bank committed to service excellence and technological advancements, has a wide array of innovative services depending on advanced systems. To ensure continuity of its mission critical applications and services, Soneri Bank implements, for the first time in Pakistan, Disaster Recovery Solution making its entire core banking and Phoenix switch completely high available via Symantec’s Veritas solutions. This implementation makes Soneri Bank the first bank in Pakistan to have its core banking and Phoenix switch work in a clustered environment.
The bank’s country wide operations are controlled through two most critical systems namely the web based Online Centralized Core Banking application; and the Phoenix switch that controls the banks entire alternate delivery infrastructure. The bank has recently migrated to a new centralized core banking application which comprises of Retail Banking, Trade Finance, Corporate and Commercial Finance, Consumer Finance, Foreign Exchange & Treasury modules. Since even a few minutes of downtime of these mission critical applications is unaffordable and any data loss could be potentially catastrophic, ensuring end-to- end data protection and 24/7 availability of these systems now ensures smooth enterprisewide remote banking operations.
With this contingency plan in place, Soneri Bank is now shielded from the catastrophe of system failures. Clustering at Soneri bank, through industry’s leading cross- platform clustering solution, Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation, ensures high availability of mission critical applications and systems, particularly Phoenix switch and core banking host, with ideally zero data loss; thus ensuring business continuity, uninterrupted services to bank’s customer, and measurably greater visibility, control and flexibility over Soneri’s mission critical applications and storage environment. The robust and reliable solution provides data consistency and integrity at primary as well as disaster recovery site.
The biggest challenge encountered during the implementation process was to maintain continuity of the e-Banking services at the bank and existing alternate delivery channels. TPS sound technical resources ensured smooth flow of normal operations during the cutover through proactive management of the migration process.
