ХBank created an IT infrastructure independent of external factors during the war

In March of this year the XBank technical committee met on emergency basis. On the agenda was the question of how to further ensure the functioning of two data centers in Kyiv and Dnipro, responsible for supporting the life of the organization.

Given the proximity of Dnipro to the front line (existing de facto since 2014), this facility has since been classified as being in the high-risk zone. As for the security of the site in Kiev – the organization's forecasts were more optimistic. However, XBank's advanced technological development, as it turned out, determined their ability to effectively counteract external factors in a pessimistic scenario.

The risk of physical destruction of both data centers at once, and the consequent loss of the data that represents the essence of the banking business, brought the IT team to a crossroads. The choice arose between the possibility of building a new site in Poland, for example, or following through on plans to migrate to the cloud, which in peacetime were intended to be completed in a year and a half.

At a certain point, the creation of a data center abroad looked like a fairly acceptable solution. The bank considered the NBU's requirements to host data exclusively within the country, but expected that, given the events, the regulator might make concessions. However, after making calculations with the others, they resorted to a solution, which for economic and technological reasons turned out to be optimal. Relocating the data center from Kyiv to support critical services to the west of Ukraine and deploying a virtual site in the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud would secure the data securely.

The project to migrate data to the cloud was handled by the XBank team with partial support from Accord Group. In just one month it was possible to deploy the cloud site, adding an additional cloud component, Cisco ACI Cloud, to the pre-installed Cisco ACI system. Ten additional Cisco virtual routers were introduced to provide the necessary bandwidth between the ground and the cloud. Since the existing cloud at the time of the military aggression was viewed by the institution as a test site, it did not need significant performance. A 100 Mbps channel ensured the operation of only 2-3 services out of 500 available to the bank. The additional routers increased throughput, allowing cloud-to-ground connectivity to cover all of the institution's business services. Cybersecurity issues and data protection in a virtual environment are resolved through Cisco virtual firewalls, licenses for which are provided free of charge by the manufacturer within the framework of the action to maintain sustainability of the Ukrainian business.

“XBank thought about the cloud back in 2021 that among other reasons prompted them to upgrade the network infrastructure and to move to work in the so-called application-oriented approach. It assumes that it is not the network that determines the requirements for business applications (for example, client applications), but rather the program sets the conditions for its existence on the network. This greatly accelerates the deployment of new business services, and through end-to-end automation, simplifies the work of network administrators. So, having all the necessary components of the ground infrastructure, a mature IT landscape and processes, ХBank turned out to be ready even for such extremely difficult circumstances as military aggression,” says Vadim Zaparovanyi, СTO Accord Group.

So, the risk of physical destruction of one or even both data centers of the bank is completely neutralized by the means of relocation and migration to the cloud. Now XBank has full access to the data for operations regardless of what is going on in the outside world. Some call it digital resilience.

Accord Group has extensive experience building application-oriented networks and cloud migrations, and are ready to help you build resilient, independent systems.

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