ZZIIPPEE Bank is one of the fastest-growing banks in India with more than 1200 branches across the country and manages $200 billion in assets: Cyber Security Assignment, SIM, Singapore

ZZIIPPEE Bank is one of the fastest-growing banks in India with more than 1200 branches across the country and manages $200 billion in assets. Handling millions of dollars of banking transactions per day, its customers depend upon the integrity and availability of their banking data.

The Bank has to comply with a new cybersecurity regulation that requires financial institutions to have DRPs and BCPs to prevent massive losses during a disaster or data breach.

The Bank realizes that it has to move its IT operations to a less risk-prone area. Furthermore, it has to separate its production and disaster-recovery facilities by a large distance to be immune to a widespread disaster. But it has to do this in such a way that it would lose no data in the event of a production data-center disaster.

The Bank plans to consolidate its multiple data centers into a single production data center with remote protection. It plans to have its disaster-recovery site in another state with an equipment configuration that is an exact mirror of the production facility.

The Bank plans to keep the backup data center’s databases in synchronism with the production data center via asynchronous replication.

However, the Bank estimates that it might lose up to 30 seconds of data following a production-site outage because of the asynchronous-replication solution. To solve this problem, the Bank can use a third minimal disk-only “bunker” site closer to the production site to act as a second up-to-date data repository.

The Bunker is a secure ex-military compound, purpose-built to protect data from every potential threat including nuclear attack. All infrastructure is kept 30 meters below ground, behind concrete walls three meters thick only accessible through two-ton steel doors and guarded 24/7. It is floodproof, bombproof, and immune to EMP and digital eavesdropping.

Therefore, should the production site fail, the nearby data bunker would contain all transactions that were executed up to the time of the outage. No data would be lost. This data bunker is designed to survive the effects of a disaster that could take down the production site.

The data bunker would be linked to both the production site and the backup site. In the event of a production-site outage, the backup site would quickly bring its database up-to-date by establishing a session with the data bunker and downloading only the data changes that it had missed. Once this is accomplished, the backup site would be put into production with zero data loss.

Implementing a 3-Data-Center architecture using a mix of asynchronous and synchronous replication ensures that no common disaster will prevent the Bank from offering its services to its customers and partners while at the same time ensuring zero data loss and fast recovery times.