Ujjivan Financial Services Adopts IBM Infrastructure Managed Services and Cloud for Business Continuity and Enhanced Customer Service

BANGALORE, India, Aug. 21, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Ujjivan Financial Services, a leading microfinance company in India, has selected IBM's private cloud resilience services to ensure continuous business operations for its clients' critical financial transactions. Under the terms of the agreement, IBM's private cloud will help create a dedicated and robust infrastructure for its primary setup. The cloud based Virtualized Server Recovery (VSR) solution will provide the company with a fully managed, around-the-clock solution designed to support application continuity, reduce business expenses and data loss.

Ujjivan is a fast growing microfinance company with a primary focus on urban areas across India. Established in 2005, Ujjivan has a pan India presence with 375 branches, over five thousand employees, and 1.3 million customers. The company provides a range of loans and services for business, education, housing, and livestock, among others, to the urban and semi urban poor, especially women.     

The organization approached IBM for a fully managed cloud service to support its rapid growth and ensure high availability and always-on operations. With IBM's Cloud VSR solution, Ujjivan will be able to provide its customers with faster and streamlined recovery and manage its complete IT application infrastructure through a remote monitoring center in Bangalore.

"Uninterrupted customer engagement is imperative for businesses to succeed in today's market environment," said Samit Ghosh, Managing Director, Ujjivan Finance. "Protection and access to the company's data during service interruptions and unforeseen incidents can make or break a company. IBM's proven expertise in cloud-based virtual recovery provides us a highly resilient infrastructure that will help us mitigate downtime risks and ultimately ensure that we are able to meet the around the clock needs of their customers."

IBM's Cloud VSR is a managed service, which offers sophisticated, affordable automation that helps enterprises recover mission-critical applications, servers and cloud-based data in the event of an outage or disaster. With VSR, Ujjivan will be able to replicate entire systems in real-time including system files, databases, applications and user data in a way that is independent of the make and model of the underlying hardware. In addition, Ujjivan is now able to plan for the wide range of issues that could affect operations. In the event of unexpected downtime, Ujjivan can gain 100 percent functionality within minutes opposed to average 8-12 hours.

"In the last few years, cloud technologies have rapidly transitioned to a strategic requirement for organizations to ensure business continuity and resilience," said Lingraju Sawkar, Director, Integrated Technology Services, Global Technology Services, IBM India/SA. "Through IBM's VSR solution, businesses can significantly alleviate their exposure to data loss, decrease server downtimes and thus allow for faster turnaround during times of disaster."

In India, IBM is working with several leading financial institutions and enabling them to build a robust IT environment aligned to their business strategy. Being a global leader in building and managing data centers and cloud resiliency infrastructures, IBM has a strong foothold across sectors by creating optimized, flexible data centers that are aligned with their business goals. 

About IBM Cloud Computing
Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

About Ujjivan Financial Services
For more information, please visit: www.ujjivan.com

About IBM
For more information, please visit: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/it-services/business-continuity-and-resiliency-services.html

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SOURCE IBM