It is one of the oldest urban cooperative banks in India, but you
can’t mistake it for being outdated. Cosmos Cooperative Bank Ltd is
relentlessly working towards innovation and making its services and
functions more robust to serve its customers better. But when it came to
giving the bank’s IT infrastructure a makeover, there was a lot to be
done.
A year ago, the bank had 17 independent servers, several of them outdated and badly networked. “With power costs going through the roof, running them was proving to be expensive,” reveals Vasant Manwadkar, Head, IT, Cosmos Bank. Maintaining these servers also meant designating at least three people for their upkeep, apart from paying for their AMCs and
several licenses. Not just that, having 17 physical servers also meant dedicating to them a lot of space, something that is always at a premium for an enterprise.
That is when the bank decided to do something about the rising IT costs. “We convinced the management that for the same money that we paid for the AMC and the licences, we could bring in an altogether new system,” says Manwadkar. The management was supportive and the move was sanctioned. Today the bank has 18 virtual servers, which houses all applications excluding the core banking solutions. The internal cloud is within the network and is protected against external threats. “We use the server virtualisation concept, have rack-mounted servers and a load balancer, so if anything goes wrong, it switches on the local servers,” tells Manwadkar.
The bank has not only saved a lot on energy costs, but will also cover the cost of virtualisation in the next three years. Also, only one person is needed for the upkeep as against the earlier three. Scalability is much easier and faster, since everything is now virtual. But Manwadkar feels that the finance industry still needs more support and trust from the IT industry where cloud computing is concerned. “It may not be matured enough in India because of the risk of network attacks. We are still not very confident of an external cloud and don’t want too many computers trying to contact it,” he says. However, he is hopeful that the recent news of Infosys offering CBS on cloud will help somewhat. “If the company’s contract with Nabard comes through, other banks will also feel confident enough to consider it,” he hopes.
Manwadkar also feels that cloud computing as a concept is coming up in India and that very few companies here are using it as compared to the high rate in the US because IT infrastructure in the country is a big challenge. “Cloud needs reliable connectivity, a big issue for us in India. Connectivity with our branches in remote parts of India is a challenge,” he says. He also rues the fact that law and order here leaves a lot to be desired since redressal in such cases is not speedy. “And because the concept is still not too popular in India, the cost advantage is not every great – the operating expenses and capital expenses seem to be the same and one wonders why invest in it, unlike Western countries where because of mass usage, the cost is very low,” Manwadkar reveals.
http://business-standard.com/india/news/bankingbetter-it-solutions/157713/on
A year ago, the bank had 17 independent servers, several of them outdated and badly networked. “With power costs going through the roof, running them was proving to be expensive,” reveals Vasant Manwadkar, Head, IT, Cosmos Bank. Maintaining these servers also meant designating at least three people for their upkeep, apart from paying for their AMCs and
several licenses. Not just that, having 17 physical servers also meant dedicating to them a lot of space, something that is always at a premium for an enterprise.
That is when the bank decided to do something about the rising IT costs. “We convinced the management that for the same money that we paid for the AMC and the licences, we could bring in an altogether new system,” says Manwadkar. The management was supportive and the move was sanctioned. Today the bank has 18 virtual servers, which houses all applications excluding the core banking solutions. The internal cloud is within the network and is protected against external threats. “We use the server virtualisation concept, have rack-mounted servers and a load balancer, so if anything goes wrong, it switches on the local servers,” tells Manwadkar.
The bank has not only saved a lot on energy costs, but will also cover the cost of virtualisation in the next three years. Also, only one person is needed for the upkeep as against the earlier three. Scalability is much easier and faster, since everything is now virtual. But Manwadkar feels that the finance industry still needs more support and trust from the IT industry where cloud computing is concerned. “It may not be matured enough in India because of the risk of network attacks. We are still not very confident of an external cloud and don’t want too many computers trying to contact it,” he says. However, he is hopeful that the recent news of Infosys offering CBS on cloud will help somewhat. “If the company’s contract with Nabard comes through, other banks will also feel confident enough to consider it,” he hopes.
Manwadkar also feels that cloud computing as a concept is coming up in India and that very few companies here are using it as compared to the high rate in the US because IT infrastructure in the country is a big challenge. “Cloud needs reliable connectivity, a big issue for us in India. Connectivity with our branches in remote parts of India is a challenge,” he says. He also rues the fact that law and order here leaves a lot to be desired since redressal in such cases is not speedy. “And because the concept is still not too popular in India, the cost advantage is not every great – the operating expenses and capital expenses seem to be the same and one wonders why invest in it, unlike Western countries where because of mass usage, the cost is very low,” Manwadkar reveals.
http://business-standard.com/india/news/bankingbetter-it-solutions/157713/on
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