Out-tasking and Backup and Restore

Executive Summary

Overview
HDFC Bank Limited is one of India’s leading banks, with a nationwide network of 1,229 branches and 2,526 automated teller machines (ATM) in 444 Indian towns and cities. Headquartered in Mumbai, the bank’s objectives are to be the preferred provider of banking services for targeted retail and wholesale customer segments and to achieve healthy growth in profitability consistent with the bank’s risk profile. To help achieve its targeted, annual growth in profits, the bank uses out-tasking for certain functions, enabling management to focus on core banking expertise and strategic initiatives rather than process requirements. The bank’s IT department out-tasks branch management, application development and customization, and management of backup operations in its data center.

Barriers
HDFC Bank’s growth strategy has helped the bank to become one of India’s most profitable banks. This success has resulted in a five-fold increase in data volume for the bank from 2003 through 2007 and a heterogeneous and widely distributed infrastructure. To compound on its growth, HDFC Bank prepared for listing on the U.S. Stock Exchange in March 2006. The Information Security Group of the bank, along with audit teams, made recommendations for encryption of tapes for critical applications along with procedural controls for transportation of tapes between the primary site and the disaster recovery site so that internal and compliance processes were followed by the bank. The bank’s growth strategies created several challenges in the area of backup operations. The challenges included: managing data volume growth, providing cost-effective solutions keeping with the bank’s out-tasking strategy and business goals, and ensuring legal and regulatory compliance.

Solution
As systems became more heterogeneous and the volume of data began to grow significantly, HDFC Bank recognized the need to standardize its backup infrastructure. In 2002, the bank decided to standardize on one back-up software infrastructure and by 2004 had finished deployment of Veritas NetBackup 4.5. Additionally, based on the Information Security Group’s compliance recommendations involving NetBackup, the bank contracted with Symantec Managed Backup Services to oversee management of the NetBackup environment. Moving to a single-owner environment for backup operations gave the bank 24×7 onsite management and support for its backup operations, as well as access to the Symantec development team for the deployment of Veritas NetBackup 6.0.

Benefits
The managed services and technology solutions from Symantec are producing tangible business value for HDFC Bank. The Alchemy Solutions Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis of the solutions and quantified realized and projected business value from April 2004 through December 2009 in the following areas:

• Backup Labor Productivity Cost Avoidance: $759,200 USD in labor productivity cost avoidance due to greater data backup productivity per IT FTE
• Backup Labor Productivity Savings: $120,750 USD in labor savings by reducing the number bank IT FTEs involved in the data backup operation and consolidating multiple backups systems to Veritas NetBackup
• SAN Media Server Cost Avoidance: $1,000,000 USD in realized and projected cost avoidance by eliminating the need to purchase two new media servers every month
• Data Encryption Savings: $88,500 USD savings in a three-year period through a decrease in the number of LTO tapes, media servers, and the time spent on hardware encryption

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