National Bank of Ukraine Adopts IBM

IBM Corp. announced
that the National Bank of Ukraine has adopted IBM’s
smarter computing approach to IT to help simplify the management and protection
of billions of financial records across the Ukraine.

As part of the agreement, IBM will help the financial institution store, backup
and process more than 16TB of information.

As the Ukrainian financial services industry expands, the need for fast, secure
and reliable banking is critical. Currently the National Bank
of Ukraine is providing financial guidance to more than 176 banks, representing
more than 125 million personal and corporate financial accounts. To address
this rapid growth and the increasing need to provide fluid, uninterrupted
transaction flow throughout the country’s entire banking system, the National
Bank of Ukraine decided to start at the heart of the matter, where the data
resides – storage.

"We realized that if we wanted to
dramatically reduce the potential impact of an IT disaster, while fulfilling
international banking regulations, keeping our clients happy and our expenses
under control, we had to start innovating at the heart of the process – where
the financial data was being stored," said Oleksii Bilash, head of the
IT department at the National Bank of Ukraine. "That is why we opted for a system capable to handle the growing flow of
incoming data in a fast, reliable and secure way. The IBM solution outperformed
other offerings in four key criteria: performance, fault tolerance, quick
recovery and total cost of ownership."

Under the
agreement signed last year, IBM and its Business Partner Integrity Vision LLC installed 16TB
of storage disk space and server virtualization. A storage platform based
on two connected IBM System Storage DS8800 systems was established. Its capabilities, such as the IBM System Storage Easy Tier
technology, help optimize system by automatically placing data at the most
strategic storage level. For example, more commonly used data is automatically
and dynamically placed on solid SSD for fast access, while less frequently
accessed data is placed on more cost-effective storage systems – all without
disruption to applications. With the new solution in place, performance has
improved, costs have lowered, and the bank’s window for full backups has
decreased twofold.

"IBM relies on the best teams, deep
industry insight and first-hand experience in implementing financial solutions
and improving IT security and compliance for organizations worldwide,"
said Penko Dinev, country GM, IBM Ukraine. "The new storage platform for the National Bank of Ukraine is scalable
and can easily accommodate the bank’s future needs in terms of data storage or
implementing new analytical approaches that will help the bank turn the stored
data into financial insight."

The agreement between IBM and The National Bank of Ukraine is the latest in a
string of smarter computing adoptions from financial institutions across
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the Middle East and Africa, as banks look to
improve operational efficiency and benefit from recent advances in enterprise
and cloud technologies.

In 2011 alone IBM
announced 10 different smarter computing agreements with banks from across
CEE including Sberbank in Russia, PKO Bank Polski in Poland, Erste & Steiermarkische Bank in
Croatia, PRAVEX-BANK in Ukraine, Garanti Bank in Turkey, JSC Rietumu Banka in Latvia, Societe Generale in Serbia, NovaLjubljanska Banka in Slovenia and Raiffeisen Bank in Romania and Czech
Republic. In Kenya, IBM announced five strategic agreements with such
banks as Credit Bank, Co-operative Bank, Family Bank, National Bank
of Kenya and National Industrial
Credit Bank.

Those deals are
among more than 20 similar agreements that IBM has signed with banks throughout
Africa in 2011.