The year 2020 was an unprecedented year due to the pandemic. SBI, being a systemically important bank couldnt have missed the digitisation bandwagon that was witnessed in 2020. More digitisation leads to a pressure on data centers and thus it’s important to manage this nerve centre for 24X7 availability of systems.
When many of the SBI employees were given virtual access and privileges, overall, the data center availability was satisfactory. The servers performed upto the expectations. The softwares and firmwares were upgraded as a part of the regular refresh exercise.
Fireside Chat: Amit Saxena, Global Deputy CTO, State Bank of India | DCIDS 2021
The year of the pandemic has offered opportunities to embed automation capabilities. SBI is looking forward to adopting automated functionalities. The bank is currently using machine learning and analytics to improve server performance. The application monitoring tools are operational in addition to ML models being run to monitor server performance, API call performance, which helps in procurement decisions in terms of compute, storage etc. to be acquired for meeting the future demand. The decisions are taken based on the historic data of the last few months. AI is yet to come in action.
SBI doesnt take decisions on cloud adoption on which workloads can go on cloud and which cannot. The growth potential of the workload is the determinant to qualify it to be hosted on a cloud model. The bank runs its own private cloud with one of the very important applications hosted on the private cloud, in addition to a few important internal facing applications too. Private cloud enables quick creation of RHEL based and VAPT tested, virtual machines, in a matter of 5-10 mins. “We have benchmarked our cloud on how well it is doing however we are too big a bank to rely on just one cloud. A hybrid cloud model works for us. There is a discussion going on with big public cloud providers on the scope of standardising their cloud models to collapse the learning curve for companies like us. This will help in adoption of multiple clouds from different companies without going through the learning curve,” says Amit Saxena, Global Deputy CTO, State bank of India.
Given the growth in the amount of digital transactions, the plan is to soon add more cooling systems in the data center. In the last year, the Govt undertook many initiatives to improve the network connectivity. Additionally, the overall internet penetration has also improved, which has reduced connectivity bottlenecks. As a consequence, the digital transactions at the branch level and especially on the YONO platform has taken a surge. “We add a small private bank every month, that is the kind of growth YONO has given us,” says Saxena.
Amit Saxena has a three point suggestion for CIOs planning to move to public cloud – data purity, API standardisation and API rationalisation. All coupled with a robust middleware architecture will make the application ripe to be moved onto a public cloud.
SBI is exploring public cloud opportunities because of the limitations of handling the exponential transactions surge with a bare metal environment.
This article is based on the fireside chat conducted as a part of Express Computer’s Data Center and Infrastructure Digital Summit. To watch the video, click here