One of our key customers is in the financial services industry, specifically a large credit card services company. Like any company committed to providing excellent customer service, they chose to modernize their business by adopting Kubernetes.
They use Kubernetes to modernize their credit card processing experience, so their customers can make transactions faster. With microservices built on containers, they use Kubernetes as their orchestration tool, and Portworx as their container data management layer. Now, thanks to their Kubernetes data strategy, they can move faster than ever before and drive hundreds of application clusters and thousands of nodes with minimal overhead.
However, financial service companies are under intense scrutiny to ensure zero data loss and next to no downtime.
This major credit card company is no exception. They process huge volumes of sensitive data that are under strict regulatory scrutiny. Data privacy legislation, like GDPR, requires companies to take full responsibility over ensuring the protection of their customer’s financial information. If these companies are caught in a non-compliance situation, the consequences can be severe. The global average cost of a single data breach is $4.45 million—a steep price tag when 83% of organizations reported having a data breach[1].
Financial services companies also need to be wary of service outages, as uptime for financial institutions is a baseline expectation. The consequences of a single data breach or service outage can have more than just a monetary impact—it can also result in a loss of trust and customer loyalty.
Using containerized workloads did not mean they could compromise on data protection. However, they quickly realized that their traditional backup methods for virtual machines weren’t going to work for containers and Kubernetes.
How one financial services provider protects their Kubernetes data in a single click
Financial services companies can’t risk the outcomes of improperly protecting their data. That’s why this major credit card services provider chose Portworx Backup to handle their key data protection use cases, like backup and restore, compliance, and security.
Backup and restore went from hours to minutes
This major credit card services company runs stateful data on NFS-based volumes, and they need to quickly process—and protect—huge volumes of credit card transactions daily.
Prior to using Portworx Backup, restoring their Kubernetes applications was a manual, tedious process. If an application was ever compromised, restores happened from the replication disk, so users had to go in and manually find the respective database in the NFS location, stop application writes, recreate the NFS location, reprovision the PVC, and redeploy the application itself. With all of these manual steps, a simple restore could take a team hours or days to recover the application and its data.
With Portworx Backup, backup and restore is simpler than ever. Teams select the precise application that needs to be restored, and restore the application in a single click—even with the thousands of nodes that need to be protected. A process that used to take the better part of a work day can now be done within minutes.
The credit card service company’s teams are also consistently deploying new Kubernetes clusters to support faster credit card transaction processing. Their platform engineering teams needed a way to automatically add these new clusters to their Portworx Backup instance. Using APIs they can automatically add these new clusters to existing backup schedules.
These flexible schedules can be determined by the use of namespace labels, creating an easily sortable repository of backups. So, they are able to create and delete new tenants at will, knowing that the corresponding namespaces will automatically be added and removed to the backup schedules as needed.
Easily setup RBAC using existing infrastructure
Like many large global 2000 companies, this financial services company needed robust security in the form of role-based access controls (RBAC). However, they needed the Portworx Backup RBAC to match their existing infrastructure. They integrated their Portworx Backup instance with their existing SSO infrastructure using APIs. Using an LDAP integration, they were able to import users and groups for easy RBAC settings that are already pre-defined.
Based on who each team member is, permissions are granted based on these predetermined groups, offering granular role based controls so each individual only has permission to access what is necessary for their respective roles.
By using these key automation tools in their backups, this major credit card services company is able to easily protect the applications that are driving faster credit card transaction processing. Now, they can rest easy, knowing they will be able to limit any downtime and ensure a fast customer experience for anyone using their cards at a credit card terminal.
To learn more about how Portworx can help your financial services organization better protect sensitive Kubernetes data, check out the O’Reilly book, Container Storage and Data Protection for Apps on Kubernetes.
Learn how Portworx can help you protect, manage and unify Kubernetes storage with live instructors. Register for hands-on-lab today.
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Janet Wi
Portworx | Senior Product Marketing Manager
