Powering High Application Availability for an Indian Bank Through VDI

Client Profile

The client is a leading private sector bank in India, founded in 1985 and part of a prominent financial services conglomerate. Over the years, the bank has expanded its national footprint and emerged as a leader in offering digital-first banking services, catering to both retail and corporate customers.

Challenges

The bank wanted to adopt Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to improve application availability and streamline its IT operations. However, several challenges arose in implementing VDI across various core banking functions, including Treasury, remote branches, and loan processing centers:

• Treasury: Required fault-tolerant, high-speed access to financial applications and real-time data from currency and stock market exchanges. Even slight delays could lead to significant financial losses.
• Remote Branches and Loan Processing Centers: Needed reliable access to core banking applications, despite varying bandwidth availability across locations. Loan processing centers also needed to access large volumes of scanned documents and support peripherals like printers and scanners.
• Contact Centers: Demanded 24/7 availability of both voice and data applications, along with efficient segregation of voice and data paths to maintain operational continuity.
• IT Teams: Required role-based access to specific applications while adhering to strict banking regulations and compliance standards.

Anunta Solution

Anunta leveraged its extensive experience in virtualization to design and implement a customized VDI solution that addressed the bank’s diverse needs. This solution was built on a combination of persistent and non-persistent Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVDs), Hosted Shared Desktops (HSDs), and desktop virtualization technologies like Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH), XenDesktop, and XenApp.

The key components of the solution were:

• Tailored desktop environments for each user group, including:
  • Treasury: High-speed, fault-tolerant desktops to ensure real-time access to financial applications.
  • Remote Branches and Loan Processing Centers: Optimized desktops for use over low-bandwidth connections and to support peripherals.
  • Contact Centers: Shared desktops that could handle both voice and data applications with efficient segregation.
  • IT Teams: Customized desktop profiles, active directory policies, and network routing schemes to meet compliance requirements while delivering role-based access.
• Anunta ensured the seamless integration of the bank’s Treasury function with that of a newly acquired bank within just 24 hours.
• The solution began with a pilot deployment for 300 users and later expanded to over 4,000 users across various departments, achieving a 1300% increase in user adoption of the virtualized environment.

Key Benefits

The implementation of Anunta’s VDI solution brought several measurable benefits to the bank:

• Streamlined desktop management allowed for quick integration of the Treasury function from the newly acquired bank, completed in just 24 hours.
• The VDI solution reduced software deployment time by over 90% and cut power consumption by 85%, compared to traditional desktop setups.
• Anunta’s system design ensured that the bank’s applications were available 99.97% of the time, ensuring continuous operations and minimal downtime.
• The bank saw an 80% reduction in incident-to-user ratios. Additionally, smart monitoring proactively resolved 90% of issues, resulting in a 54% reduction in mean time to response (MTTR).
• Remote branch users with limited bandwidth were still able to access core banking systems efficiently, improving productivity and user satisfaction. Contact center agents could seamlessly handle voice and data applications from the same terminals.