Banking: The Genius of Cloud

Very few would know that Shamrao Vithal Co-operative Bank (SVC), one of the leading co-operative banks is not only known for its growth but also for growing with technology. The bank groomed its internal IT department to develop its own in-house, 3-tier architecture based banking solution on a distributed database called 'Genius I' to provide a single window solution for all banking products required by its customers. It has its own core banking solution. And this is now available to more than 30 other banks as well. Riding on the technology growth, the bank soon grew into a wide network encompassing 115 branches.

Boasting of a sophisticated IT department headed by Ravikiran Mankikar as the general manager, who is responsible for looking at both technology and the business of technology. The bank has formed a robust architecture of security at all the levels right from the network to application, database to the user level. At present, Mankikar is busy building a 3-tier data center at Thane, to support internal and external needs. Apart from the latest and perhaps the most significant implementation, was bringing standardization and automation in the entire architecture along with adopting virtualization.

The bank is using the VMware solution for virtualization across 2 bunches. In the first it used 3 servers supporting about 20 virtual machines that run the head office applications. In the second bunch, the bank uses a cluster of 6 servers that would support around 15 virtual machines running the core banking application, which is used by about 1,000 employees. With the help of the new infrastructure the bank could bring down the total number of physical servers from 90 to 9.

One of the most critical functions to be derived from the implementation was to have a platform that could run the core banking system GENIUS for the bank and for the customers and that it could be delivered over the cloud or managed service to other banking and financial institutions. This is already in the process to be offered to around 25 banks.