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Quest Tools Reduced the AD Recovery Time by a Factor of 5 and Ensured Business Continuity in Forum Bank
Quest Tools Reduced the AD Recovery Time by a Factor of 5 and Ensured Business Continuity in Forum Bank

Forum Bank established in 1994 is one of the largest commercial banks in Ukraine today. About 200 outlets of the bank offer a full range of banking services to more than 500,000 customers. Since 2008, Forum Bank has been a part of the German Commerzbank Group.

Task 
Forum Bank's 1,500 users rely on Citrix terminal solutions for the access to mission-critical business applications. Active Directory (AD) is used for the authentication and the provision of the safe access to the bank's systems. Minimizing AD downtime is an inseparable part of the bank's business continuity assurance process.

Functions of the System Software Unit of Forum Bank include not only the management of the AD environment, but also the implementation of projects that improve the efficiency of business processes. Such projects make it necessary to update AD on an ongoing basis, for instance, by adding or deleting objects, attributes or policies. In its turn, this increases the risk of the accidental deletion of AD objects that can result in problems with the users' access to the systems.

Forum Bank's specialists came to an opinion that the backup and restore facilities available in AD are insufficient, because they do not provide for the separate restoration of the deleted AD objects. Instead, the entire AD has to be restored, which means that the systems would not be accessible and the bank's entire business would stop. Although this issue has not been faced in reality yet, the bank realized that it can result in a serious incident and the downtime of mission-critical systems.

In order to reduce possible risks, Forum Bank required a flexible tool making it possible to restore deleted objects quickly and easily without the need to restore the entire AD and the related downtime. In addition, the bank required a solution for the emergency backup, should the entire AD be inaccessible.

Quest Solution 
Forum Bank turned to Quest's AD restoration solutions on the basis of recommendations of their colleagues from Commerzbank.The recommendations were confirmed with opinions of IT professionals on the Internet and Microsoft awards in the field of partner solutions for Active Directory.

Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory is a simple solution for the quick AD data online restoration. Comparative reports show the modified or deleted elements of the AD offering the opportunity to restore at the object or attribute level. This granular restoration reduces time-related and financial losses associated with the users' inability to access AD.

Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition is a solution for emergency backups that enables an organization to restore the entire AD forest, if the directory is damaged. In this case, the process is quick and automated to the maximum extent: the product choses a non-damaged backup copy, isolates the damaged environment, and runs automatically all the manual steps required for the restoration of a domain or a forest. The process is controlled from a single console without the need for the physical interaction with the domain controller required by the standard tools. By speeding up the recovery, Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition helps organizations to avoid considerable financial and operational losses.

Key functions noted by Forum Bank in the Recovery Manager include the ability to restore specific AD objects and attributes and the comparison of the domain condition in control points with the subsequent analysis of changes and reports. The smooth integration with Microsoft (such as System Center Operations Manager) products turned out to be extremely important. Quest's reputation as a leader in the field of AD management solutions played an important role here as well.

The tests of the product confirmed that Recovery Manager met the requirements of Forum Bank. The product was rolled out in the entire bank after the pilot implementation.

End Result 
Recovery Manager for Active Directory ensures rapid solution of issues with the bank's AD and restores all the necessary data without system downtime. "Several minutes of downtime mean financial losses for a bank; one hour of downtime can result in the loss of the bank's reputation and the customers' trust, "Vitaly Sydorenko, Head of the System Software Unit of Forum Bank, commented. "Quest Recovery Manager simplifies the AD restoration and makes it possible to quickly tackle the issues before the hit the customers and the operations of the bank."

Recovery Manager saves time for the bank by simplifying the restoration of specific objects and attributes in the AD. "We used to restore AD objects and attributes using LDAP browsers. It took a lot of time and slowed down the solution of issues by administrators," Vitaly Sydorenko explained. "Using Recovery Manager for Active Directory, we can quickly find the last backup and restore all the necessary data five times as fast as before.This is an 80% time saving."

As of today, there were no serious emergencies in Forum Bank that would have made it necessary to use Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition. However, the bank realizes the value of this tool, once it becomes necessary. "Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition offers guarantees of the high availability of our mission-critical business applications for our users and supports the business continuity," Vitaly Sydorenko stated.

 

Forum Bank 
Forum Bank established in 1994 is one of the largest commercial banks in Ukraine today. About 200 outlets of the bank offer a full range of banking services to more than 500,000 customers. Since 2008, Forum Bank has been a part of the German Commerzbank Group. For more detail, see www.forum.ua

About Quest Software 
Quest Software simplifies the IT management and reduces its cost in more than 100,000 companies all over the world. Our innovative products simplify the solution of the most complicated IT management tasks giving our clients an opportunity to save resources and time in the physical, virtual and cloud environment. For more detail, see www.quest.com.

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