How Muthoot Fincorp Battled Downtime and Achieved 99.5 Percent Availability

As enterprises become more tech savvy, their dependence on connectivity (both intranet and Internet) keeps growing. So, it can be said that the bigger the organization, costlier the downtime. Muthoot Fincorp Ltd realized that.

Established in the year 1887, Muthoot Fincorp Ltd is focused on providing a host of financial services. Its services comprise a mix of retail offerings in the areas of gold loan and other loan products including auto loans, home loans, micro finance loans and investments.

Being an early adopter of technology, most of the company’s services depended on connectivity, hence downtime was a problem that Muthoot Fincorp Ltd had to solve.

With regard to solving the issue of downtime, Muthoot Fincorp needed solutions that had the capability to support MPLS and broadband (both ADSL and 3G datacard) and provide extensive next-generation firewall (NGFW) features offering exhaustive perimeter security to branch networks.

“Prior to the implementation of the project, Muthoot Fincorp’s branches were linked to its head office over unsecured broadband connections. Although there was no fallback for computers in LAN in accessing central location, the branches were experiencing over 25 percent downtime due to poor Internet connectivity,” says Muthoot Fincorp’s CIO, Krishnan Nilakantan.

The company wanted to upgrade its IT infrastructure to provide secure and fail-proof connectivity to its branches, many of which are located in tier II and III cities and remote villages.

“A major advantage the project gave us is that now we have broadband as primary fallback and 3G data card as secondary fallback to the main MPLS connectivity,” says Krishnan.

The NGFW solutions the company implemented supported automatic failover dialup to secondary (broadband) and tertiary (datacard) links on an as-needed basis along with VOIP; Web/URL filtering; branch video surveillance; and support for datacards of various service providers.

A very significant development that occurred owing to implementation of the project is that the branch availability became more than 90 percent. “With end to end (Branch to DC/HO) secured, always-on connectivity MPLS link, now we have 99.5 percent availability,” says Krishnan.

“With the major issues being solved, now we can provide better, faster and uninterrupted service to our customers. Also, with perimeter firewall policies enforcing access to only authorized applications, branch productivity increases manifold. All these resulted in increased customer satisfaction,” he says.