Banking on Virtualization

A leading multi-state scheduled co-operative bank, TJSB Sahakari Bank, invests in Citrix to improve manageability and boost efficiency with desktop virtualization

TJSB Sahakari Bank is one of the leading multi-state scheduled co-operative banks in the country. With a modest beginning in 1972, the bank presently has a network of 63 branches spread across Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka with a mix business of well over `7,000 crore. The bank has shown consistent growth and profit, and has strong internal reserves. With a deep focus on recovery and non-performing asset (NPA) management, TJSB Sahakari bank is the first co-operative bank to offer Bancassurance products.

The Pain Area
As the bank was witnessing steady y-o-y growth, the expansion led the bank to shift into a head office spread over an area of 33,000 square feet. The number of desktops in the bank was set to exponentially increase from 100, and was expected to rise to 350.

Subodh Nagwekar, CIO, TJSB Sahakari Bank was quick to anticipate the challenges that lay ahead. With the increase in the number of desktops, data security, its maintenance, application loading and back up of data would pose a big challenge for the IT team at the bank.

To handle maintenance of the existing desktops, the TJSB bank already had several dedicated engineers. The addition of desktops meant the number of engineers also had to go up.

"We realised that the time had come to look at a solution that could address all our pain points. The need of the hour was to deploy that not only made it easier for us to manage and maintain desktops but was also scalable," said Nagwekar. The bank was looking for a solution that could meet all its requirements. It zeroed in on Citrix XenDesktop solution.

Implementing Solution
Magnamious Systems, a Citrix Silver solution advisor played a vital role as a strategic advisor for the desktop virtualization solution deployment at TJSB. Deepak Jhaveri, director, Magnamious Systems said, "After several meetings and running of a successful PoC, the bank decided to move to Citrix XenDesktop. We executed this order and upto the customer's expectations the results were delivered."

The bank had deployed HP C7000 Blade Chassis and Hex Core Dual Processor Blade Servers with 96 GB of memory with three primary hosts on which Citrix XenApp was installed. All the floors of head office are interlinked with Fibre backbone and Gigabit Switches. More than 100 desktops of the employees working in the head office were migrated to Citrix XenDesktop with Wyse Thin Client. After deployment at the head office, TJSB is now focusing on implementation of desktop virtualization at branches also.

The applications running on thin clients were Core Banking application, regular files, intranet, anti money laundering software, loan origination software, and other web-based browsing applications and legacy application for banking.
The Citrix and Magnamious team worked closely with Nagwekar, who said, "The company discussed and demonstrated the Proof of Concept (PoC) with us and conducted an on-premise PoC for 15 days. It was only after, we were fully satisfied that we went ahead with the implementation."

Benefits Availed
Jhaveri said, "This deployment was a strategic one for the bank and we are happy to be part of this deployment that will help them save costs, boost efficiency, and improve manageability."

The deployment of Citrix Xen App, which is an on-demand application delivery solution, resulted in applications to be virtualized, centralized and managed in the datacenter and instantly delivered as a service to the bank users anywhere on any device.

"Post deployment of the Citrix solution, there has been centralization of all data, and back ups, are taken centrally, thereby ensuring that no data is lost. This has also minimized the outflow of information from thin clients, "said Nagwekar
As the desktops are now managed centrally, there is no need to have a fleet of engineers. The bank has also been able to control and encrpyt access to data and applications to improve security.

The thin clients with browsers ensured that the bank saved license costs. The bank was also able to resize UPS and reduce power consumption. Power savings for the bank has been to the tune of 40%. There has also been significant process improvement.

Nagwekar said, "We were able to install one network printer per floor, instead of a printer for every floor.The printer has been connected to the Citrix server. This enables us to reduce overall printing cost by 40-60%. If you look at it, the solution has resulted in an overall efficiency by more than 40%."
As the solution enabled maintaining of single instance of each OS and application for organization, it significantly reduced SAN storage and IT administration costs. It also brought in agility in the bank as rolling out new versions and updates are now a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks.

Some Challenges
Desktop virtualization allows the bank to more tightly control the environment of its users, and so the users are generally more secure and robust. RBI also has cautioned banks on adopting virtualization blindly and has suggested them to use introspection capabilities to monitor the security of activities. If an attacker uses malicious code and gets access to underlying OS, he can control the server and also all the desktops without getting detected.

TJSB has put in place the physical and logical controls and effective Information Security Policies to prevent the same. The network and systems are hardened and they are regularly patched and updated under the advice of the vendor/s. A qualified and a Cert-in certified agency also does regular audit and VAPT on the system as an extra precaution.

Plans Ahead
On the future plans for TJSB, Nagwekar said, "We will continue to grow at a fast pace by steadily opening new branches. Plans are in place to ramp up our branches from the existing 63 to 100 over next two years. We are always at the forefront of technology adoption, and has received several awards for IT implementations."

The bank had deployed core banking solution in 2005 and has already stated VISA debit and mobile banking.

"As mobile users are increasing, we are equipping our employees on ground with mobile devices, which would be connected to Citrix," said Nagwekar.