18 November 2008

When Turkey’s İş­­ bankasi needed to regain control of its e-mail stores, it worked with HP and Data Market to find a solution. Jacqui Griffiths found out how the project led to a more streamlined and compliant business

Türkiye İş Bankasi is Turkey’s first truly national bank. Founded following the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1924, it was mandated by Atatürk in response to the new country’s need for a national bank to support its social and economic development. From humble beginnings with two branches and 37 staff, İş Bankasi has grown to become Turkey’s most respected and trustworthy enterprise, and one of the world’s largest corporations with 891 branches, 11 of which are overseas.

İş Bankasi has remained true to its founding principles, while engendering several key innovations, from the use of cheques for daily transactions to the introduction of ATMs and the initiation of electronic banking in Turkey. Its use of advanced technology enables İş Bankasi to run real-time transactions and maintain consistent service levels throughout its network, including online real-time operations and efficient self-service banking options.

Of course, İş Bankasi’s forward-looking approach and high service standards mean that it can’t rest on its laurels when it comes to information governance. The bank was using the Microsoft Exchange 2003 e-mail platform, but as e-mail volumes continued to grow, it was struggling to store and manage them efficiently. “We didn’t have an e-mail archiving solution in place, only tape backups for our Exchange data files,” says Selim Selvi, IT director at İş Bankasi.

“The system just couldn’t cope,” says Selvi. “This was slowing down the performance of the main server, which meant that it was difficult for us to maintain agreed service levels. In addition, we were finding it hard to manage information retention times to comply with regulations.”

The issues were also impacting the accessibility of information, potentially hampering customer service and further threatening regulatory compliance. “We were encountering issues in searching e-mails and retrieving information effectively in response to inquiries or for auditing purposes,” says Selvi.

Answering e-mail issues
Realising that it needed to resolve these issues, İş Bankasi decided in 2006 to implement an e-mail archiving solution. It considered several options before turning to its long-standing partner HP. Together, the companies embarked on an analysis of the problems and how they could be resolved. “The main effort during this phase was on understanding and analysing customer needs, defining an information policy and then selecting the right implementation steps,” says Ayça Konak, sales manager for information management at HP.

The assessment phase identified a number of key requirements. From a compliance, as well as a business information management perspective, İş Bankasi needed to be able to apply different retention times for different e-mails, depending on the sender, or on metadata that qualified the message’s sensitivity or importance.

The ability to reduce operational cost with the solution also emerged as an important factor. It was essential that costs would not rise along with the volume of data that was being managed, but would stay constant and, therefore, controllable. In order to avoid costly backup operations, for example, a replicated, disaster tolerant solution was recommended, with mirrored configurations.

“Zero management costs emerged as a very high priority at the beginning of the project,” says Konak. “Another important aspect to address was the indirect management costs that result from backing up and maintaining multiple copies of the same documents and messages. These were stored in personal folders by many users, who were somewhat ‘forced’ to save those messages locally on their laptops since the central e-mail system had assigned quotas on their individual mailboxes.”

In addition, it was important that the solution was based on Microsoft technologies. “Microsoft Exchange is a foundational element of our business, considering the increasing importance of e-mail in business transactions,” says Selvi. “We trusted Exchange as a robust platform to run company business, and we didn’t want to move away from that.”

İş Bankasi therefore decided to implement the HP Integrated Archive Platform (IAP) and HP e-mail archiving software for Microsoft Exchange, along with Exchange 2003 and its flexible journaling capabilities.

Once the analysis was performed, İş Bankasi worked with Turkish system integrator Data Market, an HP Preferred Partner and a Microsoft Gold Partner, to implement the solution. “İş Bankasi has worked with Data Market for over 15 years, for all its HP and Microsoft implementations as well as other IT projects,” says Selvi.

The implementation was followed by a six-month pilot phase, and went fully live early in 2007. “The implementation project took two months,” says Murat Boyla of Data Market. “Following this, İş Bankasi’s 22,000 users were able to work with an archived system.”

Perfect partnership
Long-standing cooperation between HP and Microsoft means that the Integrated Archive Platform seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007. With minimum impact on performance (less than six per cent), it provides a secondary, safe and hacker-proof storage for messages and attachments. A team of seasoned support engineers, with skills and experience in HP software, provides ongoing, round-the-clock support for the solution.

All incoming, outgoing and internal e-mails are now preserved for specified time periods, which vary between one and ten years. In addition, the system offers full Turkish language support for e-mail search operations, and has resulted in improved performance – by offloading the e-mail server, İş Bankasi has enabled a 30 per cent reduction in response times to users. There have also been huge reductions in the time taken to search for information. “When searching for archived e-mails, the retrieval time has shortened from several hours to just a few seconds,” says Selvi. “This allows İş Bankasi to address regulatory requirements in a fast and professional way, and to save precious hours of the IT staff’s time.”

These improvements deliver two-fold benefits: İş Bankasi can ensure it complies with regulations, while full text search capabilities are enabled for e-discovery and audit tasks. These improved storage and search capabilities also help to ensure a culture of compliance throughout the business. “Users are aware that all e-mails are now stored, and can become ‘evidence’ in any legal or compliance case concerning the bank,” says Selvi. “This has generated a more disciplined approach to the usage of e-mail as a business tool.”

İş Bankasi is already enjoying significant benefits from its archiving system, and since the solution is both scalable and flexible, it will continue to do so. Having successfully taken control of its e-mail archiving, İş Bankasi plans to add further smartcells in the future, in order to upgrade the system and enable file server archiving. “We are interested in addressing other areas with similar needs, such as Microsoft Office documents and then paper-based documents,” concludes Selvi. “We are working to build a central, unique and well-managed enterprise archive, which is the cornerstone of today’s information governance culture.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2008 edition of Finance on Windows magazine.

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