Standard Bank Group is one of the big four full-service South African banks. This move reduced Standard Bank’s storage utilisation by 65% and enables access to critical corporate data – whilst significantly reducing its data storage costs.
Standard Bank Group is one of the big four full-service South African banks. The group operates in a range of banking and related financial services. It has a wide representation which spans 17 African countries and 16 countries outside of Africa with an emerging markets focus. The group had total assets of over $182 billion in 2009 and employs more than 50,000 people worldwide.
Standard Bank needed a centralised, managed, enterprise email and file archiving system to achieve optimum levels of global compliance and storage efficiencies for its rapidly growing data infrastructure. The bank turned to bluesource, a leading messaging and information management solution provider, to deliver and fully manage an enterprise email and file archiving solution.
bluesource created a new archiving migration strategy for the rapid consolidation, protection and management of Standard Bank’s UK information stores, across its multiple data centres. The migration project covered three streams of bank data including; auditable journal, archive and historical data. Symantec’s leading data archiving solution, Enterprise Vault was chosen to enable the bank to effectively store, manage, access its file system data and Exchange email – whilst coping with future capacity growth.
bluesource remotely migrated 22 terabytes of Standard Bank’s data – delivered with a 99.99% success rate. The bank now has a centralised UK data archiving platform that offers complete data mobility, enabling it to easily cope with future migration needs.
bluesource is also remotely rolling out further data archiving migrations for Standard Bank’s offshore locations including Hong Kong and Jersey. Standard Bank also outsourced the management of its new archiving environment to bluesource to save on costs, reduce risks and improve efficiencies. The service is delivered remotely from bluesource’s Service Management Centre in London and provides 24/7 management of the health of the bank’s archiving infrastructure and proactive resolution of incidents, to reduce data risks.
As a result of the bank’s new archiving policies, it has seen a dramatic reduction in primary storage capacity requirements both for e-mail and for file system data. Thanks to the archive-any-message-older-than-one-week policy and an archive of all attachments larger than 2MB, the size of the Microsoft Exchange database has fallen by 60%.
The bank has also been able to reduce the capacity consumed by up to 70% and reclaim valuable storage capacity. Standard Bank has also addressed its global data compliance and e-discovery obligations and is now able to manage different retention policy regulations across its geographies.
The bank is now able to easily identify electronically stored information in response to discovery and audit requests. Discoveries include files, e-mail and .pst files that had previously been scattered but are now managed in a central repository.
We were faced with the seemingly impossible task of decommissioning our old legacy archive platform and moving to a new, more cost effective and compliant platform. The bluesource team reduced the migration costs by 75% and halved the time, impressing us with a seamless end to end migration of all our corporate information to the new system. Thanks to the knowledge and expertise of the bluesource team we were able realise the value of the new, more agile system which allows us to unlock critical corporate data that was previously unsearchable.
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