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October 13, 2009

UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Limited Improves System Recovery Time by 50 per cent and Improves Business Resiliency with Acronis

"Acronis True Image Echo enables us to reduce system recovery time by more than 50% and deliver an enhanced level of business resiliency. In addition, the ability to restore systems to dissimilar hardware provided by Acronis Universal Restore gives us a lot more flexibility in deploying our disaster recovery plan."

– Mr. Fok Ka Kui, Head of Information Technology at UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Limited

Introduction

UOB Kay Hian group in Hong Kong is a stalwart in the stockbroking industry, providing premium financial services including online trading, local and regional equities trading, derivatives and futures trading, and providing research services to clients. UOB Kay Hian currently provides their clients with a comprehensive range of stockbroking and investment related services.

Given the fast-changing financial market and the need to continuously provide real-time information and trading services, UOB Kay Hian strives to have a robust system which will not compromise its services. To achieve this, UOB Kay Hian invested heavily in the IT infrastructure and developed a disaster recovery plan aiming to get business up and running as fast as possible in case of a disaster.

UOB Kay Hian decided to improve the backup and system recovery process, and set three objectives for this project. The first objective was to improve business resiliency by reducing the system recovery time. Secondly, an architecture that would support off-site recovery should be built. Last but not the least, backup and recovery needed to be performed in a simplified and unified manner.

Disk imaging technology – best solution for quick backup and recovery

Taking into account the three requirements, UOB Kay Hian evaluated a number of backup and recovery software products in the market. Acronis True Image Echo stood out as the best option.

"Our business cannot really afford system downtime and jeopardize losing our clients’ trust. The Acronis solution uses disk imaging technology, which provides a much faster and more reliable backup and recovery process. It is just what we were looking for," said Mr. Fok Ka Kui, Head of Information Technology at UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Limited.

Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server and Universal Restore were purchased for this project and installed on the servers across the organization. The whole implementation process only took two weeks without training. "Acronis solution is simple to use," said Mr. Fok. "By working with an evaluation license of Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server, our staff could pick up the knowledge and skills required for running the software in a week."

System recovery time reduced by over 50%

"Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server helps us cut down our system recovery time by more than 50 per cent!" Mr. Fok was very delighted to see the immediate benefit after the installation.

Recovery process can be a tedious process. It usually involves reloading the operating system, patching, re-installing the backup application, complex configurations and then data restoration. The whole process can take up to a few hours before the data restoration can begin.

Now with Acronis, UOB Kay Hian can create an exact image of the server disk, including all data and operating system components, with the machine online. Therefore, the entire server can be restored swiftly in the event of a system crash.

Automated scheduling frees IT staff up for important projects and eliminates human errors

UOB Kay Hian was impressed with the efficiency and effectiveness delivered by the Acronis solution. "Acronis offers an automated and hassle-free solution to eliminate our labour-intensive and error-prone recovery process. Prior to using the Acronis solution, we needed dedicated IT personnel to review and verify individual operation system, application, configuration and user setting whenever a system was restored. With Acronis, we no longer need to perform these time-consuming tasks manually. Scarce and valuable staff time is saved and that translates into significant cost savings."

With the automated scheduling capability, UOB Kay Hian is able to schedule periodic backup tasks without human intervention, therefore, chances of human error have been reduced dramatically. Creation of backup tasks is tailored by group or certain times or events. UOB Kay Hian can choose to back up critical infrastructure and current projects every day with less significant applications backed up on a weekly basis.

Creation of custom commands before and after backups also runs automatically. UOB Kay Hian can automatically run virus scanning before an image is created and verify the validity of backups after the image is created. IT administrators do not need to recreate the script to run the pre- and post-event tasks each time. All the scheduled events only need to be set up at the beginning, the schedule will take care of itself afterwards.

Acronis True Image central management console provides IT administrators with a unified tool to control backup jobs on multiple remote servers. It allows for group installation and updates. With a wizard-driven user interface, managing backup tasks is much easier and performing the entire server restore can be done with a few clicks of a mouse.

Flexibility with dissimilar hardware recovery

Apart from Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server, UOB Kay Hian deployed Acronis Universal Restore to align with the company’s disaster recovery plan. Acronis Universal Restore is add-on software complementary to Acronis True Image Echo, allowing users to move a configured system to totally disparate hardware without the need to reconfigure.

"Acronis Universal Restore has become an integral part of our IT architecture to perform complete system recovery. The software offers us more flexibility to carry out system recovery when similar hardware may be unavailable for system restoration."

Overall, Acronis plays a vital role in UOB Kay Hian’s IT infrastructure and has brought huge benefits to the organisation. The Acronis solution does not only reduce system recovery time by half, significantly mitigating data loss and system unavailability, but also minimising disruption to daily operations in any disastrous situation.

Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server helps us cut down our system recovery time by more than 50 per cent!
– Mr. Fok Ka Kui, Head of Information Technology, UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Limited

About Acronis

Acronis is a world leader in providing advanced, scalable storage management and disaster recovery software that helps enterprises safeguard their information and assures the availability, security, integrity and recoverability of their infrastructure. Acronis’ patented disk imaging and disk management technology has won broad industry acclaim and numerous awards for excellence in data protection, backup and recovery, system deployment, and server migration for both physical and virtual machine servers.