Kenya-Based KCB Group Selects Actifio

Actifio, Inc. has been chosen to provide backup and application development support for KCB Group Plc, East Africa’s largest commercial bank.

The bank has placed the Actifio platform at the center of its DevOps and data management initiatives to assure stability and continuing business growth.

It was established in Kenya in 1896. It has since expanded into Tanzania, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia (Rep). The KCB Group network includes 330 branches, 1,076 ATMs and more than 18,818 merchants and agents offering 24×7 services, including mobile and Internet banking.

Gabriel Kimanzi, KCB’s IT risk and security officer, said: “We identified Actifio as our best backup and recovery solution through a competitive process. Not only did Actifio closely match our primary criteria, but it also provides creative support for application development using application-aware data mounts. That is very powerful for us; a great benefit.“

Complex IT is central to the operation of KCB’s banking business. Its technology needs to operate responsively to support bank business in 7 countries while protecting the bank’s production and backup data centers. The bank needed to replace its complex and time-consuming tape-based process to eliminate unacceptable time delays and data recovery failures.

“The success rate of our old backup system was horrible,” said Kimanzi. “We wasted too much staff time dealing with failures. It had become a major pain point and a real danger to the bank’s business.“

The KCB team recognized Actifio’s value in saving application developers’ time by using data virtualization to create database copies as needed without adding storage system capacity.

“Actifio is a powerful tool for data protection and application development. Backup speed, simplicity of management, and excellent support were all factors in our decision,” said Christopher Tiren, KCB’s chief procurement officer.

The Actifio benefits to KCB start with a powerful and affordable backup, test and development platform. The business has also gained simple, reliable, and performance for backup and recovery in time savings and self-service for application developers.

Case study KCB Group uses Actifio