Myanmar's Kanbawza Bank (KBZ Bank) plans to virtualize its data center to help support the nation's growing digital economy.
KBZ Bank will be modernizing its IT infrastructure for the benefit of all 482 branches as well as representative offices in Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia.
With more than 40% market share of the commercial and retail banking business in Myanmar, KBZ Bank recognizes innovation and digital transformation to be crucial in its expansion at home and abroad.
The virtualized and agile environment provides bank employees with a digital workspace and the freedom to work on any device, giving them more opportunities to collaborate internally with others at the bank.
When asked about KBZ’s broader digital plan, KBZ Bank’s CEO and advisor to the chairman Mike De Noma replied, “This is just one of the many steps we will be taking to do our part to support the government’s efforts to make Myanmar a digital leader in the decade ahead and to maintain its position as a mobile first nation.”
Virtualization across the entire infrastructure from compute to storage and network allows KBZ Bank to scale up or down based on business needs, driving down operational and ownership costs significantly and simplifying IT management. The stability of the environment also ensures system up-time of its ATMs and branches, and boosts the bank’s ability to respond faster to demand spikes.
The bank will use software-defined data center technologies to provide more secure services and new applications to cater to the growing demand for digital services from corporate, SME and retail customers.
As Myanmar opens up further to foreign investment, the risk of cyber-attacks also increases for businesses. For its part, KBZ Bank is strengthening the security of data and processes through a virtualized network with VMware NSX which tags specific IT policies to each individual workload.
Each workload is protected from attackers who manage to breach the perimeter defenses of a data center, enhancing the security of KBZ Bank’s IT infrastructure and better safeguarding the confidential information of its customers.
First published in Fintech Innovation