Africa-Press – Liberia. Disasters can often be unavoidable – whether natural or man-made. If September 9, 2011, was not enough of a hint, then the Covid-19 pandemic was a wake-up call to remind us that uncertainties can shift the natural course of our lives, and business is not spared in the entire mix of things. It is necessary then to have a backup plan- to stay ready so one does not have to get ready.
In banking, a disaster-management plan in general is not a luxury — it should be mandatory. Technology has made it easier to deal with the volumes of data that a bank uses regularly to provide its services. It also provides different opportunities and systems for disaster recovery and backup.
This case study highlights how the banking industry can stay disaster-ready using the disaster recovery site project deployed by Enterprise Computing Limited (ECL) for AccessBank Liberia (ABL).
ECL is an ISO-certified professional services company with the aim of providing global, relevant, and consistent enterprise-scale solutions alongside 24/7 fanatical support.
Its major offerings are hybrid cloud infrastructure, cyber security, business process automation, and backup and recovery. ECL has a growing presence; it is currently headquartered in Ghana and has a regional office in Liberia.
AccessBank Liberia is also a leading financial institution with the passion to bring financial inclusion closer to Liberian citizens. The bank has opened its services to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.
“Every banking institution regularly collects data to effectively provide relevant services to its clients. The data (customer and transactional) runs on a core banking infrastructure within a primary service delivery area.
In the event of a disaster or any unforeseen event that affects the primary service delivery area, there may be limited or no access to data required at any point in time. This may also result in a lag or complete halt in business operations. This will adversely affect the bank’s efficiency and service delivery to its clients,” ECL said.
“For this reason, it is expedient that every bank has a robust backup system to ensure there is no disruption in operations and service delivery no matter the internal or external environment,” ECL added. “The backup system includes a disaster recovery site which will house a replica of every form of data collected for business processes.”
In this regard, AccessBank Liberia, to ensure the continuous availability of services to its diverse customers, initiated an infrastructure upgrade of its Disaster Recovery Site (DRS), and ECL was contracted to provide deployment setup, installation, and support.
The project focused on upgrading ABL’s DRS via the setup and installation of computing resources comprising servers and storage. It also meant ensuring the reachability of the DRS deployed resources by ABL’s existing infrastructure to facilitate business continuity.
The main objectives of the project were DRS infrastructure upgrade, improving service availability, improving performance in the server environment, and improving business continuity processes.
ECL mentioned that the major deliverables to guarantee the success of the project were the delivery of all products per scope, setup and installation of hardware systems, a configuration of systems in High Availability for Disaster Recovery, and reachability of DRS deployed resources via the current infrastructure.
Looking at the deployment plan, ECL added that the overall solution and services were to be delivered in two phases, both onsite and remotely. They disclosed that their team was on-site for initial racking and cabling activities followed by remote sessions to finalize system configurations. All deployment activities were completed within 4 weeks, after which the bank was offered post-implementation support from ECL.
On quality management processes, ECL stated, “A virtual infrastructure setup and deployment are typically handled by ECL’s certified engineers with extensive experience deploying servers and storage. As the bank’s partner, ECL leveraged its deep expertise in deploying similar solutions in delivering this project.”
They also named the following quality standards were followed: meeting design requirements, best system deployment practices, and quality management system practices.
“Understanding the scope of work helps in effective project implementation. The ECL team did a thorough process discovery of the ABL’s processes and its infrastructure which helped determine the exact areas of implementation, upgrade, and support,” ECL added.
Speaking on project cooperation, ECL said collaboration is key in time management for projects. According to them, the ability of ECL to complete this project in record time was hinged on ABL’s commendable efforts in terms of making all necessary resources available to the project team.
“It was also necessary to have a knowledge transfer session between teams after deployment is completed. This was to onboard the ABL IT team on the proper project details to ensure smooth continuity of the DRS processes even after post-implementation support,” ECL concluded.
The ECL team vowed to remain a reliable partner for not only disaster recovery and backup solutions, but tailor-made enterprise-related solutions with 24/7 fanatical support.
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