Alpha Bank in Greece Relies on Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Alpha Bank, Greece’s financial institution for more than 140 years, replaced legacy backup with its Availability Suite to support core banking operations, digital transformation and customer experience.

By integrating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) storage and vSphere, Veeam increases backup, replication and recovery speeds by 99% to underpin the bank’s BC and DR strategy. Monitoring and reporting with Veeam provide visibility into the virtual environment to meet SLAs with affiliate banking partners and demonstrate compliance with the GDPR. Veeam also aligns with the bank’s goal of low TCO by saving 30% on storage costs and 20% on software costs. It improves the data duplication ratio up to 22:1 and offers affordable licensing options.

“Veeam supports our top business priorities – data protection, BC and DR, regulatory compliance and TCO – at the highest level with minimal effort,” said Efthymios Bekas, assistant manager, Alpha Bank, IT systems division. “Exhaustive quality and performance testing were carried out before we introduced Veeam into our IT infrastructure, proving why Veeam is considered one of the best solutions on the market and the optimal solution for Alpha Bank.“

Bekas said data protection and data management had become slow and complicated with legacy backup, putting critical IT systems supporting banking services at risk.

“Our systems must be available all the time so we can meet customers’ banking need,” he said. “If they’re not available, we risk customer satisfaction which might damage the bank’s reputation, cause regulatory penalties and even revenue loss.“

Veeam backups and replicates 9.2PB of data on-premises from HPE 3PAR StoreServ snapshots across more than 7,500 vSphere VMs to HPE StoreOnce. it also integrates with HPE Nimble and HPE Primera (storage solutions the bank will deploy next).

“Veeam delivers the performance integration that was missing from our legacy solution,” Bekas said. “In addition to storage-based snapshot integration, Veeam provides revolutionary features that support digital operations including Instant VM Recovery, catalyst protocol, replication, BC and DR. Veeam protects data now and in the future.“

When the Covid-19, Alpha Bank had already deployed Veeam and responded to the crisis based on BC planning. Within the first 5 days of the lockdown, 75% of the bank’s employees were working remotely via a Citrix infrastructure. Veeam safeguarded the Citrix infrastructure and supported the onboarding of a record number of new e-banking customers.

“Veeam played an important role supporting banking services, employees and customers,” stated Bekas. “We had no idea the solution we picked to replace legacy backup would not only support our top business priorities but also support us through the pandemic. Veeam provides performance, security and peace of mind.“