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"We can now provide consistent and proactive IT support services to the business, which means users have more time to focus on ensuring we remain a world-class bank." |
Building foundations for the future
China Construction Bank (CCB) is one of the country's largest banks with 14,250 branch outlets. Originally founded in 1954 to help administer government funds for construction and infrastructure projects, the company's business is now focused on corporate and personal banking and treasury operations.
In addition to its extensive national presence, CCB also has a number of overseas offices in major cities, such as Frankfurt, Johannesburg and Seoul. Its customers include many of the businesses that are strategically important to China's booming economy.
CCB's success has been internationally recognized — The Banker magazine rates the company as 11th among the world's top 1,000 banks while Asiaweek has declared CCB as the continent's most profitable bank.
Turning a vision into reality
To continue to live up to such plaudits and achieve its goals for the future, CCB must be able to constantly improve and evolve its business to meet customer demand. The company is particularly dedicated to providing the best service to its customers, maximizing shareholder value and offering excellent career opportunities to employees. Given the role of technology in 21st century banking, making these goals a reality means having an efficient and robust IT infrastructure at every one of the bank's branches.
One such branch is located in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which has a population of around 20 million and boasts annual exports worth more than US$3 billion. Liu Ai Hui, Chief Engineer in the IT Department of CCB Xinjiang, comments, "The banking sector is developing rapidly, and the management team needs access to advanced information management systems to help it make intelligent decisions about the future of the branch."
Coping with complexity
Although the bank's success is undisputed, more than 50 years of growth and innovation have been a difficult process for CCB — and its IT infrastructure. The Xinjiang branch has a highly heterogeneous environment, with multiple hardware platforms and operating systems, including various versions of Windows and UNIX.
Xinjiang's IT department, which comprises dedicated teams for system operation, network management, facility purchasing, production security management and software development, is responsible for supporting this vast and disparate infrastructure. The department supports all the bank's offices in the province, which accounts for about one sixth of China.
Simplified IT support
To help simplify the support of its IT environment and improve service levels to the business, CCB Xinjiang wanted to create a unified IT management strategy. However, this first meant deploying a solution that would enable the IT department to automate and integrate core tasks as well as create a single technical support center.
"Our support services were both inefficient and passive, and we were constantly firefighting problems," comments Liu. "We needed to transform this approach, and to ensure that daily systems management information, such as incident reports, performance data and fault alerts, could be accessed from a unified point."
To achieve this objective, CCB Xinjiang has deployed an infrastructure and service optimization solution from CA. This solution, which combines workload automation, service availability, and incident and problem management, provides the bank with a unified platform to manage its control center systems, networks, databases and core banking applications.
"Using CA's service availability management solution we can monitor our infrastructure in realtime and discover any potential problems before they impact business continuity," comments Liu. "If there is an incident, the solution helps to identify the root cause, so we can rectify the situation quickly."
CCB Xinjiang is also using the solution, which is founded on CA Network and Systems Management, CA ServicePlus Service Desk and CA Autosys, to help manage its job processing, maximize database performance and create standardized IT processes.
Creating a secure platform
The implementation of a new IT management solution also gave the bank the chance to make necessary security management improvements. Using CA Access Control, CCB Xinjiang controls and audits access to the servers hosting their critical financial applications and data. This solution helps them to both prevent unauthorized access and limit the vulnerabilities of the privileged superuser account that is often shared amongst server administrators.
CCB Xinjiang has also improved the productivity of IT workers maintaining their systems. In order to maintain multiple secure servers and applications, workers had to manually login each time they needed to perform an action on a separate system. CA Single Sign-On improves their efficiency by automating logins to distinct systems after a single, secure authentication.
Delivering maximum value with minimum effort
As a result of the implementation, CCB Xinjiang has been able to set up a dedicated technical support center based on ISO9000 standards. Using CA's solution, this center has been able to enhance operational management and the quality of the bank's IT services.
In practice, this means that the IT department has been able to:
- Reduce its daily workload, freeing up staff for more strategic activities
- Minimize business risk by increasing system security
- Improve application availability
All these factors help contribute to the bank's overall goal of delivering excellent customer service and maximum value to its shareholders. "CA's solution provides us with the foundations we need to drive IT quality and efficiency," comments Liu. "We can now provide consistent and proactive IT support services to the business, which means users have more time to focus on ensuring we remain a world-class bank."
Content posted on: 16 July 2007
