French bank Societe Generale is working with e-Hosting DataFort (eHDF) in the region to ensure effective back-up and disaster recovery.

Societe Generale, in its Middle East avatar is not your usual banking fare. “Although we have been in the Middle East, our operations started off mainly as a marketing office until 2007 when we got a banking licence in 2008 which made us a branch. Today, the main activity is corporate investment and private banking,” says Abdul Mannan Contractor, CTO for the ME at Societe Generale (SocGen).

Interestingly, between the two divisions that operate here, it is almost like two different banks. Both teams sit here at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), sharing only IT which operates as a central resource under the Global Technology Services banner.

“IT offers a services-catalogue and each operation selects the services they require and are charged based on that. Almost all the critical applications used by the bank is hosted out of its main HQ in Paris where we have three major data centres. For private banking the data centres are in Luxembourg, Singapore and Zurich and collectively more than 1800 applications are accessible,” says Contractor.

Setting the stage

The lean five member team in the Middle East is geared to handle all infrastructure requirements based on a standardised environment. The primary data centre is hosted in Dubai, and other sites in the region are served via the same.

According to Contractor, the other sites also have small data centres and are connected to Dubai via high-speed lines and MPLS circuits. “The primary data centre hosts 20 servers. We have got internal IPTV telephony infrastructure, high speed links that originates from here, and voice recorded systems which are necessary for compliance requirements. For data storage we use our own servers. Data is usually archived twice over – once in Paris and also locally,” says Contractor.

In 2009, SocGen felt the need for a DR site in the region. “We initially wanted to build our own DR site but when we evaluated the requirements especially the need for minimum distance we came across eHDF,” says Contractor.

SocGen had wanted the DR site and the backup hot seats to be located at the same site. But since this was not possible at eHDF’s facilities at that point in time, these seats were located in another office in Dubai, and all three offices – the production site, the DR site and the hot seats – were connected.

In 2010 after a review of the DR site, the user seats were shifted to the same premises in order to increase availability and to rationalise on the seats. “Initially when we had done an assessment for backup and DR among our business units, we felt the need for 24 hot seats. However, with the move, we were able to rationalise this to eight core seats, plus laptops for remote access. This made the entire project a much more cost effective one,” says Contractor.

Today, all production servers are backed up on-line and any failure of our production servers automatically enables a switch over to the servers at the DR site. As SocGen grows across the region, it is finding the need to expand its reach with the help of effective IT. With data centre already operational in KSA, the next plan is to set up a DR site in KSA in line with its plan to get a licence in KSA.

“We are going in for trading activities and we therefore require direct connections to the stock markets and therefore hosting of local applications becomes very critical,” he said. The company is also surveying the options to set up offices in parts of the region including Qatar. “IT has a lot on its plate for 2011. But with unstinting support from the management and the high standards we work towards, there is no other way to go but up,” affirms Contractor.