With the strong wave of digitization, especially in response to the pandemic, Bank Sumut has transformed its digital-based products and services to meet elevated customer needs. Bank Sumut has targeted several innovations in digitizing its products, including infrastructure improvements, its mobile banking service, e-forms, debit cards, cardless ATMs, and enhancements in online credit applications.

In recent years, Bank Sumut has doubled down on its efforts to transform its already comprehensive financial services offering. Aside from the robust mobile banking platform, Bank Sumut has also launched an electronic money service called the Sumut Card, as well as the SUMUTNet Corporate service. In addition, Bank Sumut has developed the Sumut Link service, which benefits agents financially and eases the process of registering for legal or business entities. Bank Sumut also makes it easy for customers to apply for credit via its website.

Furthermore, Bank Sumut has supported the Indonesian government in accelerating the digitization of regional financial transactions through the Regional Government Transaction Electronification initiative (Elektronifikasi Transaksi Pemerintah Daerah or "ETPD"). In this initiative, Bank Sumut provides infrastructure provisioning on the cloud for districts and municipalities to host their workloads such as property tax application, retribution application, Samsat, and others.

Bank Sumut's continual growth and innovation has brought about new opportunities for the business as well as new challenges, including:

• Observability: Bank Sumut needed to observe their deployed systems to better understand the system’s internal working state, monitor outputs, calculate system efficiency, and create informative and mission critical alerts.

• High Availability: Bank Sumut required its solution to be always up and running.

• Scalability: In order to cope with increasing demands, Bank Sumut needed to make sure the solution can handle additional and fluctuating workloads.

• Security and Compliance: As a financial services provider, security is paramount for Bank Sumut's business. It needed to secure its infrastructure and applications from external attacks such as a viruses and malware. The solution needs to effectively identify and filter out malicious web traffic on the application layer, and subsequently forward clean traffic to the origin server. Moreover, the solution must be fully compliant with local regulations and industry-specific requirements.

Bank Sumut viewed Alibaba Cloud as an all-in-one cloud services provider to meet its long-term business needs thanks to its strong presence in Indonesia with three local data centers. Alibaba Cloud's wide range of cloud services across compute, storage, and security can meet the varied needs of Bank Sumut, especially in terms of managing its infrastructure and mechanisms, as well as strengthening its operations and services to customers. Alibaba Cloud’s complete solution stack was perfect for streamlining Bank Sumut’s business processes, addressing its security needs and meeting its application requirements.

While local data centers in Indonesia ensure compliance with Indonesia’s regulatory requirements, clear service level agreements (SLAs) ensure adequate and prompt support to build a reliable infrastructure. In addition, Alibaba Cloud experts helped Bank Sumut define, design, and build transparent processes for smooth and quick implementation, which can support the digitization efforts at Bank Sumut and meet the needs of customers in the digital era.

Bank Sumut utilizes Alibaba Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) to monitor traffic between the internet and the district's and municipal’s web applications. It then filters and blocks traffic based on a customized set of rules or policies. WAF helps Bank Sumut prevent the most common web attacks, automatically fixes zero-day vulnerabilities, and blocks unauthorized scanning and detection activities.

Bank Sumut’s website application is hosted on Alibaba Cloud's Elastic Compute Service (ECS) servers and is guarded by Security Center to protect it from ransomware and other threats. Security Center is also capable of providing a compliance assessment to assist Bank Sumut in meeting regulatory compliance requirements. To support the web application workload, Bank Sumut hosts the data in ApsaraDB for RDS, deployed in a multi-zone setup, which provides a complete set of solutions for disaster recovery, backup, recovery, monitoring, and migration. ApsaraDB eliminates the need for complex configurations and other hassles that typically come with database operation and maintenance.

For non-web transmission of data over the network such as Secure Shell (SSH) for maintenance, or integration with the bank’s on-premises database, everything is encrypted with a virtual private network (VPN). This VPN deployment comes with a hot-standby architecture to achieve failover within a few seconds, and with session persistence and zero service downtime.

Each of the municipal's and district’s workloads will be isolated in different VPCs. Bank Sumut utilized the capability of transit routers on Cloud Enterprise Network to forward data between VPCs within the same region.

In the future, Bank Sumut plans to fully leverage the container and microservice capabilities of Alibaba Cloud’s Container Service portfolio.