Virtualization has raised banks’ data safety, reduce costs of server hosting—Iwegbu
Former group head, e-Business and payment, Access Bank Plc and managing director of Pn Consulting, Peter Iwegbu has revealed how commercial banks relied on strategic thinking to evolve virtualization as a model of data management.
Giving further insights on hosting of server by banks an interview, he explained that banks’ servers are based on applications ran and that a typical bank in the country runs an average of 20 applications which means 20 servers.
However, in compliance with the central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) directive to either upgrade their data centres or host their data at a Tier III data centre, commercial banks in Nigeria have adopted outsourcing model in hosting of their data as a way of cutting costs rather than hosting individual servers running into more than 20 per bank.
Data centre is an information technology infrastructure that houses servers and other strategic information storage facilities which are used by banks and corporate bodies for their day to day operations.
In Nigeria today, there are rack spaces in every data centre comprising of 42U and a 2U in a rack contains between 16 to 18 servers depending on their specifications, and cost $1,000 monthly to host a server at a data centre in the country.
But the invention of virtualization by banks has reduced running costs from paying for 20 servers to just one box of server containing all.
Agreeing that the old story where banks host their multiple servers differently has changed with virtualization, Iwegbu averred that “This means that a bank can have one physical box with partitions inside of the box for the various applications that the bank runs. With this innovation, instead of a bank hosting 20 or more servers as the case was in the past the bank will host only one physical box reducing cost”.
Continuing, he noted that the brain behind virtualization idea in banks stemmed from the fact that investing and managing of Tier III data centre is a huge investment for banks to undertake going by the present economic situation in the country as well as high technical expertise it requires which is the reason they go for outsourcing.
Besides, the specifications of Tier III data centre are costly and demanding to the extent it is not realistic for banks to adopt, thus giving more credence to the idea of outsourcing via virtualization.
