MANAGED HOSTING

SERVICE MEETS AND

EXCEEDS WEALTH

MANAGEMENT-

RELATED SECURITY

AND AVAILABILITY

LEVELS.

CASE STUDY

JULIUS BAER NAVIGATES ACQUISITION

INTRICACIES WITH CUSTOMISED MANAGED

HOSTING SERVICE SOLUTION.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

A major financial services corporate acquisition carried with it the need to set up a new infrastructure in India, with systems and data that would be moving completely separated, along with fully assured security and compliance.

SOLUTION

Custom-engineered Managed Hosting Service exactly replicated donor computing and storage systems, with all milestones delivered to promised time, budget and functionality targets. Strict security requirements met with outside-the-box solutions.

BENEFITS

The 99.90 per cent availability SLA has been consistently exceeded in the three years the system’s been running, while the care and commitment of the entire Tata Communications team are both beyond question.

ABOUT JULIUS BAER WEALTH ADVISORSAs the leading Swiss private banking group, the origins of Julius Baer date back to 1890. Since then it has been dedicated to serving and advising sophisticated private clients around the world. Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. is the Group’s largest company and main operating entity. It is complemented by specialised businesses providing international clientele with a full array of state-of-the-art wealth management services.

For more information visit: www.juliusbaer.com

99.90% availability SLA consistently

exceeded

Innovative VDI security

provisions

25-day transition

Everything promised unfailingly delivered

“The selection of Tata Communications was based on the astounding detail and thoroughness of its proposal, which was confirmed by the professionalism of the face-to-face presentation. Furthermore, it was a brand name we knew we could trust.”

VINAY BAGLA, DIRECTOR IT, JULIUS BAER GROUP

04/2018

SYSTEMS SEPARATION NOT OPTIONAL

With a staff of over 6,000 – including close to 1,400 relationship managers in over 25 countries – Zurich-headquartered Julius Baer Group has offices in major financial centres like Dubai, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg, Milan, Monaco, Montevideo, Moscow, Mumbai, Singapore and Tokyo.

When Julius Baer acquired the Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) international wealth management business outside the US, the transaction carried with it the need to set up a new infrastructure in India.

Vinay Bagla, Director IT at Julius Baer, explains: “The Bank of America operated a shared services IT model, which meant systems and data that would be moving across to us had to be completely separated.”

TWIN DATA CENTRE SOLUTION SUCCEEDS

In stark contrast to the strictly in-house Bank of America approach, Julius Baer sought a cloud-based solution. A comprehensive market survey led to the choice of a Tata Communications Managed Hosting Service, with a primary data centre in Mumbai and a disaster recovery data centre in Pune.

“Much more than price alone, the selection of Tata Communications was based on the astounding detail and thoroughness of its proposal, which was confirmed by the professionalism of the face-to-face presentation. No one else even came close. Furthermore, it was a brand name we knew we could trust,” says Vinay.

“The Bank of America operated a shared services IT model, which meant systems and data that would be moving across to us had to be completely separated.” VINAY BAGLA, DIRECTOR IT JULIUS BAER GROUP

MULTIPLE OPERATING SYSTEMS ACCOMMODATED

With advice from the IT team at BAML, Tata Communications professional services people procured exactly the right hardware to populate the data centres supporting the software assets being moved across.

With up to 20 applications being transitioned, multiple operating systems had to be accommodated including Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In Mumbai, 23 physical servers accommodate nine VMware ESX instances with around 70 virtual machines while, in Pune, there are nine physical servers accommodating three VMware ESX instances with around 30 virtual machines.

In addition, there are 14 and three network-attached-storage servers at Mumbai and Pune respectively running Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases.

“Tata Communications went to extraordinary lengths to engineer their hosting solution to meet our security and compliance needs, including avoiding any possible element of shared infrastructure.” VINAY BAGLA, DIRECTOR IT, JULIUS BAER GROUP

INNOVATIVE THINKING ASSURES SECURITY

Tata Communications manages the infrastructure up to the operating system level, while the Julius Baer IT team manages the applications.

“We’re a Swiss company and we take our clients’ security very seriously indeed. Moreover, we’re in an intensely regulated industry,” says Vinay. “Tata Communications went to extraordinary lengths to engineer their hosting solution to meet our security and compliance needs, including avoiding any possible element of shared infrastructure.”

As an example, the Tata Communications data centres run a VMware-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for Julius Baer, believed to be the first of its kind in India. Tata Communications people managing the infrastructure can only log-in through a dedicated VDI terminal, further preserving security, while Internet connectivity is only allowed for server updates. That web traffic is scrubbed to avoid contamination.

Some 35 network devices including high-end routers and load balancers are also managed across the two data centres, while managed security provisions include physical firewalls, security information event management (SIEM) and data loss prevention (DLP) software.

FAST MIGRATION, ZERO DISRUPTION

Temporary high-bandwidth dedicated circuits were set up to port the software from the BAML data centre to the Tata Communications data centres. Once the hardware had been installed, the entire migration process took just 25 days from start to finish with zero business disruption. The merger itself took place nine months after that migration.

“The services provided by Tata Communications were in no way half-baked,” says Vinay. “Everything they promised they delivered on the day it was due.”

100 PER CENT UPTIME’S VIRTUALLY THE NORM

Julius Baer enjoys the services of a technical account manager (TAM) from Tata Communications with ad hoc interactions complemented by monthly and quarterly service reviews. Among the TAM’s many responsibilities is ensuring that the 99.90 per cent availability service level agreement is never breached.

In fact, over a typical six-month period, 100 per cent was achieved in three of those months with never less than 99.9976 per cent in the others. Similarly, the network elements of the solution have achieved 100 per cent uptime over the same period. “In the three years we’ve been using the Managed Hosting Service it’s never gone wrong,” confirms Vinay.

HATS OFF TO HIGHLY-THOUGHT-OF SUPPORT

The Julius Baer IT team can see the entire Managed Hosting Service picture through a single dashboard, which is continually improved and updated. Examples include problem management and change management modules. Likewise, during service review meetings updates are given on TAM-led initiatives like improving memory utilisation, increasing productivity by reducing unnecessary alerts, and data reconciliation to assure compliance.

“I take my hat off to the TAM and the entire team of Tata Communications people I deal with daily. Their care and their commitment are both beyond question,” concludes Vinay. “We regard Tata Communications as a genuine partner and their Managed Hosting Service as a key enabler of our company’s digital transformation. In furtherance of that we’ll be seeking to outsource more services to them.”

ABOUT OUR MANAGED HOSTING SERVICEWhatever an organisation’s size, infrastructure, or growth ambitions, Tata Communications Managed Hosting Services can be tailored to meet its exact needs. Infrastructures are hosted in state-of-the-art data centres built to TIA 942 Tier-3 standards for enhanced performance and reliability. Tata Communications takes care of everything to ensure smooth, always-successful hosting. The Managed Services Operations Centre offers 24/7/365 support, while delivery and management processes adhere to ITIL service delivery guidelines.

Find out more at: www.tatacommunications.com/services/cloud/infrastructure/hosting

“In the three years we’ve been using the Managed Hosting Service it’s never gone wrong. I take my hat off to the TAM and the entire team of Tata Communications people I deal with daily. Their care and their commitment are both beyond question.” VINAY BAGLA, DIRECTOR IT, JULIUS BAER GROUP

www.tatacommunications.com

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