Founded in 1994, Locko-Bank currently has more than 1,800 employees. According to RBC.research, over the past three years, Locko-Bank has stayed among the TOP-15 financial players in terms of car loans and TOP-10 banks in terms of SME lending. Among the company’s key clients are the energy sector, military–industrial sector, telecom and IT.
Amidst the active development of banking services, online resources are becoming increasingly important to promptly supply information to customers and enable them to order banking services. This trend makes the web portal ever more important in the work and development of the bank and calls for a revision of the existing model in favor of modern cloud technologies.
Previously, Locko-Bank used exclusively proprietary IT equipment; however, over time, the load on servers started to increase, and the existing hardware could no longer cope with it.
Locko-Bank’s IT team decided to move the site to the cloud. The main criteria of the project — in addition to upgrading the existing infrastructure of the web portal — were the creation of a failsafe solution for the reliable hosting of the bank’s website, as well as the reorganization of the content management mechanism.
Locko-Bank chose ActiveCloud by Softline that offered the best value for money along with an SLA, confirmed by financial guarantees. The decisive factor in selecting its supplier for Locko-Bank was the ability to ensure the clustering of the web portal on geographically distributed platforms for its reliable operation.
The package of agreements also included 24/7 platform support with a dedicated technical manager, automatic monitoring and management from an automated panel. As part of the project, ActiveCloud’s specialists provided a pool of virtual cloud servers — data are de facto stored on several servers of the provider located in Russia and Europe. Locko-Bank therefore managed to spare itself the need to build and maintain its own physical infrastructure. In addition, the bank only pays for the capacity it actually uses, which can be expanded in the future without additional hardware costs.
In addition to storage, ActiveCloud ensured its data integrity and backup. The main objective of the project was also achieved — to get a fail-safe web portal in the cloud: in the unlikely case of the failure of the main site in Russia, visitors’ inquiries will be sent to the infrastructure of the backup data center in Europe.
“Cloud migration empowered us to effectively address a number of key tasks. Specifically, the level of web portal management automation was significantly increased, and we started paying only for the actual power consumption,” says Kirill Karpychev, Deputy Head for Specialized Software Support at Locko-Bank. “The most important thing is that the web-portal has become truly fail safe.”
“The project to transit Locko-Bank’s website to the cloud from АctiveCloud was both exciting and challenging. The customer had strict platform security and failure tolerance requirements, and we managed to implement a geo-distributed cluster. The cloud not only spared the bank the need to constantly upgrade its hardware, but also allowed us to cut human and time resources required to ensure monitoring, support and maintenance of infrastructure — based on support and maintenance commitment under SLA Premium service,” said Elena Birulya, Project Manager of ActiveCloud by Softline (ActiveHost RU LLC).
