Headquartered in the Hague, Netherlands, Nederlandse Waterschapsbank N.V. (NWB Bank) is a leading bank within the Dutch public sector. Founded in 1954, NWB Bank is the fifth largest bank in the Netherlands in terms of balance sheet. NWB Bank is supervised by the European Central Bank and has the highest credit rating from both Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. The bank mainly serves local authorities (water boards, municipalities and provinces) and institutions under the guarantee of decentralized governments, such as housing corporations and healthcare institutions. We recently spoke with Michel Vaessen, ICT Manager and Rob Heemskerk, Network Engineer at NWB Bank.
Tell us about your team and their responsibilities at NWB Bank.
Vaessen: I oversee a nine-person IT team dedicated to supporting the bank’s internal users and external clients. Our central mandate is managing the company’s infrastructure, ICT projects, and network applications. We also provide digital services to our external clients and are currently working on creating a client portal to provide our customers even more insight into their loans and accompanying documentation.
Data availability and employing cutting-edge technology are fundamental to our IT strategy. Rubrik fits perfectly with this vision and will allow us to reap the benefits of the cloud in the future.
What issues were you experiencing with your legacy backup solution?
Heemskerk: Our previous data management solution was tape-centric and extremely complicated. I was the only person who fully understood the solution, which put pressure on our department if I was out sick or on leave. It used a command-line interface that demanded a level of Linux expertise and was not easily scalable. We have a 100% virtual environment that focuses on our SQL databases. Each of our virtual environments required an individual agent to control snapshots, which quickly became unwieldy.
Data recovery and document retrieval are key elements of our data management solution. Our users expect instant recovery. With our legacy solution, backups would be spread over numerous tapes and recovering a complete machine would often take more than 24 hours. This was unacceptable.
Why did you ultimately choose Rubrik as your data management solution?
Vaessen: We evaluated several vendors when replacing our legacy solution. We needed a product that would simplify our data management tasks while offering us the data protection that our business requires. In the end, Rubrik proved to be the most simple solution for us when it came to setting up SLA policies.
Additionally, the lack of extra software or agents with Rubrik lessens the time we need to spend managing our backups. We needed a product that integrates with Nutanix and did not require extensive training. Rubrik fits the bill and the simplicity of the interface lets us use the product without needing to call on support as often as we did previously.
How does Rubrik fit your data protection needs as a financial institution?
Vaessen: As a financial institution, we are required to protect our clients’ data by enforcing strict SLAs. We need to provide external auditors with proof that we are complying with European Central Bank (ECB) and De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) regulations.
In the past, I would spend multiple days taking screenshots and attempting to prepare suitable documents for auditors at the expense of other duties. With the assistance of Rubrik’s support team, we now have a report that satisfies our external audit team. With Rubrik Envision, we have a one-click procedure to produce SLA reports, which show we are indeed compliant with regulatory requirements.
What other benefits have you seen?
- Significant management time savings: “After Rubrik, our team has become more efficient and effective. We’ve gotten back at least four hours per week, which frees us up to work on more strategic projects.”
- Live Mount for fast restores: “Live Mount is one of our team’s favorite features. We can restore a full virtual machine (VM) from a backup in a matter of seconds.”
- Exceptional customer support: “Rubrik’s support team has consistently impressed us with how pleasant and professional they are.”
- Easy to use: “With our previous solution, we were constantly reaching out to support, which required a considerable amount of time. Rubrik’s intuitive interface is easy enough for anyone to use and requires only 20 minutes of training.”
- API-driven automation: “We love that Rubrik is built on an API-first architecture and plan on using the APIs to automate restoration of some of our more critical machines through scripts, saving us time in a DR scenario.”
Interested in learning more? Read the case study.