When the Bank Can’t Afford to Fail

The Background

When it comes to data protection in banking, there is no such thing as “good enough.” Systems must be recoverable, validated, and aligned with strict regulatory and operational standards.

MATAF – the IT division of the First International Bank of Israel (FIBI Group) – is responsible for the bank’s core technology infrastructure, platforms, and operational systems. As the central technology organization supporting one of Israel’s largest banking groups, MATAF manages the infrastructure that powers mission-critical banking services, ensuring reliability, security, and regulatory compliance across the bank’s digital and operational environments.

For years, MATAF relied on IBM TSM as its backup platform. As the bank’s infrastructure expanded, it also became more distributed and dynamic. The legacy backup platform no longer provided the flexibility, cyber-resilience, and scalability the organization really required. At the same time, the growing threat of cyberattacks made it critical to ensure that backup data remained protected and recoverable, even in the event of a security breach.

MATAF set out to modernize its backup infrastructure, selecting a platform that could deliver fast recovery at enterprise scale, immutable protection against cyber threats, and simpler operational management across its large and complex environment.

The Challenge

The bank’s legacy backup environment posed multiple challenges:

• Migration from a long-standing legacy system
• Alignment with established operational processes and working methods
• Adjustments across multiple infrastructure layers
• Ensuring reliability at a large scale
• Meeting strict enterprise and banking compliance standards
• Strengthening cyber-resilience and ensuring backups could not be altered or compromised by malicious activity

Their IT landscape was vast, complex, and deeply integrated across multiple infrastructure layers. Given that all of it supports mission-critical banking services, downtime was not an option.

The Solution

The bank partnered with TeraSky to architect and implement a new data protection framework built on Rubrik, including both a Production cluster and a Disaster Recovery cluster. The scope covered full deployment, configuration, and adaptation of the solution to the bank’s operational model.

Rubrik was selected for several key capabilities critical to MATAF’s requirements. Elior Sharabi, who leads the Infrastructure Department’s Storage and Backup Team at MATAF, explained:

“The decision to move to Rubrik was driven by the need to enhance our data security and the resilience of our backups. We sought a solution that ensures data integrity, allowing us to focus on our protection strategy rather than infrastructure maintenance, based on four key pillars:

• Rapid Recoveries: The system’s ability to perform fast restores is significant, even in large-scale environments and multi-server events. This capability ensures the organization can return to operations quickly, providing us with complete peace of mind.
• Built-in Protection: Rubrik is based on a Zero Trust architecture where protection is an integral part of the product. Thanks to the Atlas file system, our backups are Immutable by design. This is a critical layer of defense, ensuring our data remains available and protected against unauthorized changes or deletion.
• Anomaly Detection: The system can detect anomalies that may indicate encryption activity on the backed-up servers. This detection is performed transparently and is Agentless, serving as an important additional layer of protection for our data without adding technical complexity.
• Management Simplicity and Self-Service: The simplicity of the interface has transformed our workflow; instead of “managing the product”, we focus on the backup requirements themselves.

Enabling Self-Service for other teams to perform independent restores has created a Win-Win situation: the organization receives faster service, and we are no longer an operational bottleneck.”

TeraSky led the architecture and implementation, tailoring the environment through custom scripting and deep system adjustments to ensure alignment with MATAF’s infrastructure and operational model. During the Proof of Concept phase, the team validated the solution across core systems, including virtualized environments and critical databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL.

Most importantly, MATAF needed to see recovery capabilities demonstrated at scale. TeraSky executed full backup and restore validations of production systems and ran large-scale recovery simulations, including restoring approximately 100 virtual machines simultaneously. They also tested database live-mount scenarios and advanced recovery features to confirm that recovery time objectives could be met in real disaster conditions.

As TeraSky Lir Shif, Enterprise account manager, explained, “From the beginning, we placed a strong emphasis on validation. By the time the solution moved into production, it had already been tested under conditions that mirrored real operational stress.”

The Bottom Line

Today, MATAF operates a modern, cyber-resilient data platform capable of quickly and reliably recovering large-scale production workloads. Disaster recovery readiness has been tested and proven through controlled, high-volume recovery exercises.

Operationally, the new architecture simplified backup management and introduced advanced capabilities that align with the bank’s enterprise standards. Rubrik’s immutable architecture and anomaly detection capabilities provide an additional layer of protection against cyber threats while ensuring the recoverability of critical banking systems.

The move from a legacy system to a modern, scalable platform strengthened both resilience and efficiency.

A member of MATAF’s leadership team commented on the partnership, “The large-scale recovery simulations gave us clear confidence in our disaster recovery readiness, and TeraSky ensured the solution aligned with our operational and regulatory standards. Given the complexity and regulatory expectations we deal with, TeraSky’s architectural leadership, customizations, and validation expertise were critical to our success.”

Today, MATAF operates with enterprise-grade data protection designed for the realities of modern financial services. The environment has been modernized, rigorously validated, and aligned with strict banking requirements for a resilient foundation that supports the bank’s operations with proven recovery capabilities and long-term confidence.