National Bank of Rwanda underwent a number of major improvements through the recent years. Introducing a number of key applications and modern technological solutions as Rwanda Integrated Payment Processing System ensured better, more stable and secure services for Bank’s customers and more efficient internal Bank’s processes. To support a rapid development of National Bank of Rwanda, a Lithuania based company BAIP in a joint venture with NRD East Africa based in Tanzania, implemented three large-scale critical IT infrastructure projects.
“Every National bank operates on huge amounts of information. From the technical side, two things matter most: ensuring that a network has enough capacity for fast, secure data sharing and that necessary measures preventing any disturbance of operations and possible data losses are in place. We, at BAIP, go a step forward also taking care that in case of disaster, all bank operations would be restored not later than in the defined period of time. It’s called making IT infrastructure more resilient”, – Mr. Gytis Umantas, the CEO of BAIP, described the nature of services.
Through the scope of two contracts financed by the East African Community, BAIP has designed and installed Disaster Recovery Center and updated networks of high importance. The third project was financed by the Bank itself and covered consultations on centralized Data Backup and Data Recovery services. As part of the projects, BAIP offered hardware and solutions made by its international technology partners CISCO, DELL, Veritas and other globally recognised IT companies. The value of investments implemented at the National Bank of Rwanda accounted for more than 2 million USD.
Disaster Recovery Center allows continuity of Bank’s payment system in case of disaster and assists to avoid any downtime. In addition, system facilitates the centralized management of all National Bank of Rwanda IT systems. “As in any system, each part is connected with other parts, and in case of Bank of Rwanda, its network was not capable to support the increasing flows of data. Second project of Network Design and Upgrade aimed to fix that – increase the actual network systems performance, security, efficiency stability and availability”, – said Mr. Nerijus Šarnas, project leader at BAIP.
During the third project experts at BAIP proposed a set of software and hardware for the new backup and recovery solution. Solution would use minimal amount of different hardware, there for creating more uniformity and enabling central management of the whole system. Also, it would reduce time of backup administration and time of data recovery time – which is crucial in fast restoring of Bank operations and preventing from data losses.
BAIP together with its partners has already implemented similar projects in Mauritius, Zimbabwe and Burundi and is consistent in growing its presence in African markets.
