Established in 1985, as a part of one of India’s leading financial services conglomerates, the bank received its banking license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in February 2003, becoming the first non-banking finance company to convert into a bank. Moving ahead, it acquired another significant bank in April 2015. As on September 30, 2018, the bank has a national footprint of 1,425 branches and 2,236 ATMs. It has four Strategic Business Units – Consumer Banking, Corporate Banking, Commercial Banking and Treasury, which cater to retail and corporate customers across urban and rural India.
The bank wanted to adopt desktop virtualization to significantly improve application availability and make its IT operations more efficient. However, it wasn’t sure if virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) would be able to deliver transformational benefits across core banking functions. While typical VDI implementation for back-office and support functions have been successful in the banking industry, virtualization for remote branches, Treasury, and loan processing was more unusual and had not been tried successfully in the industry in India. This made the implementation unique as one which was across the board and with distinct but personalized application delivery architectures.
Treasury: Needed fault-tolerant, speedy access to core treasury specific applications and access to currency and stock market exchanges during trading hours from Monday to Saturday. Even the slightest slowness in transaction speed could potentially have an impact of millions of dollars.
Remote Branches and Loan Processing Centers: Needed reliable and uninterrupted access to a wide range of core banking applications but due to the geographical spread the branches did not always have access to high bandwidth connections. Loan processing centers additionally required access to huge volumes of scanned documents and a plethora of peripheral devices for printing and scanning.
Contact Centers: Needed robust 24×7 availability and an intelligent combination of voice and data applications with extremely high emphasis on productivity. Creating an effective continuity plan, while ensuring clear segregation of voice and data paths at the same end- point was a key requirement.
Information Technology Teams: The heterogeneous power user group comprising of software developers, network administrators, support teams and extended partner teams needed role-based accessibility to specific set of applications. The challenge was to deliver personalized end-points that are flexible yet governed by banking rules and compliances.
The bank needed a partner with deep domain expertise in virtualization technologies and extensive experience in onboarding, adoption and Day 2 management of complex technology infrastructure.
Anunta, with its years of experience quickly assessed the complexity and personalization required in implementation of the virtual desktop infrastructure solution.
Anunta designed a solution that addressed complex and diverse user base through a mix of desktop virtualization technologies viz. persistent Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVDs), non-persistent HVDs and Hosted Shared Desktops (HSDs) and Desktop virtualization OEM stacks i.e. Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH), XenDesktop and XenApp. Further, Anunta Onboarded each user groups (Treasury, Remote Branches and Loan Processing Centers, and Contact Center Users) by creating a tailored and distinct set of profile images, active directory policies, network routing schemes for each individual group to transition them to the newly virtualized environment. This resulted in delivery of personalized desktops for each user-groups.
Enhanced Application Availability: Anunta’s intelligent system design enabled the bank to provide its end-users with over 99.97% application availability.
Improved End-User Experience: Anunta’s managed services helped to reduce the bank’s incident-to-user ratio by 80%. The smart monitoring system proactively identified over 90% issues and resolved them, resulting in over 54% reduction in the average mean-time to response (MTTR).
Improved Bandwidth Utilization: End-users from remote branches with poor bandwidth were able to successfully access core banking system thereby improving their productivity and end-user satisfaction. Implementation of an efficient network design enabled contact center users to access centralized HSD profiles and answer voice calls from the same terminals.