Raiffeisen Bank (Kyiv) moves its main products to cloud
MOSCOW. June 24 (Interfax) - Raiffeisen Bank (Kyiv) has completed the transfer of its main products and clients' transitions to a cloud platform, the Ukrainian media quoted the bank's press service as saying on Thursday.
"Raif planned to migrate to cloud in a year. But we decided back on February 24 that this process is extremely important to the bank, and we should do it much faster. Step-by-step, the bank's systems migrated without any noticeable or minimal impact on the client, as we conducted this routine maintenance at nighttime," Deputy Chairman of the Management Board Enkelejd Zotaj said.
As reported, Ukraine's PrivatBank moved its data to cloud shortly after February 24.
Raiffeisen Bank (formerly known as Raiffeisen Bank Aval) was founded in 1992. As of July 1, 2021, its biggest shareholders were Raiffeisen Bank International (68.26% of shares) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (30% of shares).
According to National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) data, Raiffeisen was the fourth largest bank in Ukraine by assets (144.274 billion hryvni) among the 69 banks that functioned in Ukraine at the time.
Meanwhile, the NBU said that two-thirds of Ukrainian banks have availed themselves of the possibility provided by the NBU to use cloud services of Europe, the United States and Canada in order to protect their data from the threat of elimination.
"Forty-six banks have availed themselves of the possibility to relocate or to copy their data to cloud resources abroad. And half of these banks plan to use this possibility on a permanent basis," the Ukrainian media quoted the NBU as saying in its financial stability report, published this week.
Before February 24, only a small number of banks had reserve data storage capacity located a significant distance from the main storage center, while the majority of banks stored data in one city, the NBU said.
"The creation of new data storage centers is practically impossible without relevant equipment, while the relocation of existing ones could have led to their damage and data loss. The NBU permitted banks to process personal data and transactions of clients with the use of cloud services whose equipment is located abroad," the regulator said.
Ukrainian financial institutions have managed to withstand the onslaught of multiple cyberattacks, which seriously intensified in February, it said.
Banks' losses as a result of operational risk events will be significant, the NBU said.
As of the beginning of May, 51 banks included their crisis-related losses in the databases of operational risk events, the NBU said. The total size of these losses stood at around 6.6 billion hryvni, or more than three times higher than the losses sustained by Ukrainian banks during the 2014-2015 crisis, and more than ten times higher than the losses reported by them during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Most of this amount is the estimated losses of one major bank," the NBU said, without naming this bank.
As reported, 69 banks functioned in Ukraine before the beginning of June. However, the NBU then decided to remove Megabank from the market.