Sberbank of Russia PJSC is protected against unplanned downtime
  
Projects:
Sberbank of Russia PJSC is protected against unplanned downtime
Sberbank of Russia PJSC is protected against unplanned downtime

Sberbank of Russia JSC in Ukraine is a subsidiary of Sberbank of Russia OJSC (RF), the largest credit institution in Russia and the other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – the former Soviet Republics, formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Sberbank of Russia JSC is a vibrantly growing universal commercial bank, offering a comprehensive range of banking services to all customer segments in Ukraine.

The Bank’s business in Ukraine is based on attracting retail funds and ensuring their safekeeping, as well as on building win-win relationships with its depositors. Its balanced approach ensured robust development of Sberbank of Russia JSC in Ukraine in the post-crisis context, making it the only lending financial institution in the market in 2009.

Manually adding and deleting AD objects introduces risk

The bank’s employees use Citrix terminal solutions to access the systems they need, including business-critical systems such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, SAP and the Siebel CRM system. Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is used for authentication of these systems, and ensures secure user access. IT projects to improve business effectiveness often involve making modifications to AD, such as adding or deleting new objects, attributes or policies. At Sberbank, these changes were undertaken manually, so the risk of staff inadvertently deleting objects was high. The bank knew that this could lead to user access problems that would hurt the productivity of the bank and the service provided to customers.

Any restore using native tools involves downtime 

Although it had never had this problem, Sberbank of Russia in Ukraine knew that it was at risk. AD’s native backup and restore capabilities simply would not be able to help them recover quickly from the accidental deletion of an object, since they lack the granularity to restore individual objects. The native tools can restore only the entire AD, which would involve system – and therefore business – downtime. The bank knew it needed a solution to mitigate this risk, one that would allow deleted objects to be easily restored on an individual basis – at the object and attribute level – and if necessary, to quickly restore the entire AD with minimal system downtime. 

Fast, straightforward and granular AD recovery

In its search for an appropriate solution, Sberbank was assisted by BAKOTECH, Dell’s local partner in the CIS region. Bakotech suggested Recovery Manager for Active Directory, and Sberbank’s research found this recommendation to be backed up by Microsoft awards and excellent customer reviews. After careful testing through proof of concepts (POCs), Sberbank selected Recovery Manager for Active Directory.

“We found that Recovery Manager for Active Directory restores individual AD objects quickly and easily, thereby preventing the need for system downtime,” explains Aleksandr Polischuk, head of infrastructure and networks in the Department of Information Technology at Sberbank of Russia in Ukraine. “Recovery Manager for Active Directory stood out because of its ease of use, and with high-quality help from the Bakotech technical specialists, our choice was straightforward.”

Recovery Manager for Active Directory prevents system downtime and lost productivity as a result of human error, or hardware and software failures that corrupt AD, system configuration or Group Policy data. Backups can be automated and quickly compared to the current value of AD, so you can easily pinpoint changes and instantly recover the desired data. With Recovery Manager’s online granular restore capabilities, you can recover entire sections of the directory, selected objects or individual attributes, without taking AD offline, which reduces costs and increases productivity.

Restore an individual AD object in minutes rather than hours

Recovery Manager for Active Directory enables Sberbank to quickly and easily restore AD objects and attributes on an individual basis, as required. “Previously we used to restore AD objects and attributes using LDAP browsers, which was time-consuming and significantly slowed the problem-solving process,” says Polischuk. “With Recovery Manager for Active Directory, problem solving is now much faster – it takes a matter of 5-20 minutes to recover an object, rather than hours – and our business is not at risk of system downtime.”

Peace of mind, knowing that recovery – large or small – will be quick and easy

Primarily, Recovery Manager for Active Directory has delivered peace of mind to Sberbank. “Even though we’d never previously needed to restore our entire AD, we knew that there was always a huge risk of an AD problem causing unplanned downtime, because changes to our AD are so frequent,” notes Polischuk. “The implemented solution is protecting our business against unplanned system downtime – this is extremely valuable to our business. The bank’s reputation would be at risk if we experienced an AD failure,” he elaborates. “Even a short period of banking activity downtime would lead to financial losses and would also harm the image of the bank as a reliable financial institution. Thanks to Recovery Manager for Active Directory, we are able to substantially reduce these risks.”

 

All Projects      >