Garanti BBVA enables near-instant disaster recovery with IBM Z Flexible Capacity
What happens when downtime is not an option in one of the world’s most seismically active regions? Garanti BBVA, one of Türkiye’s largest private banks, operates in a highly regulated and risk-prone environment where business continuity is critical.
Stringent regulatory requirements from the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BRSA), alongside global frameworks such as DORA, mandate banks to recover operations within strict timelines and continuously validate disaster recovery readiness. At the same time, Türkiye’s exposure to earthquakes makes resilience not just a compliance requirement, but a business imperative.
With mission-critical banking services spread across multiple locations, Garanti BBVA needed a disaster recovery strategy that could move beyond static failover models - toward a dynamic, tested, and near-instant response capability.
To modernize its resilience strategy, Garanti BBVA deployed the IBM Z Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency solution to enable real-time workload mobility across its infrastructure.
The solution allows dynamic activation/deactivation (“event”) of processing power across four systems in Istanbul and Ankara. Through intrasite events, workload can be shifted within a data center to support planned maintenance. With intersite events, workloads can seamlessly transfer between cities to mitigate regional disruptions or outages.
When integrated with automation capabilities such as IBM GDPS, IBM Z Flexible Capacity enables near-instant activation of replacement capacity, reducing manual intervention and eliminating traditional DR bottlenecks. This approach transforms disaster recovery from a reactive process into a proactive, continuously validated capability embedded into daily operations.
With IBM Z Flexible Capacity in place, Garanti BBVA has transformed its disaster recovery strategy into a fast, repeatable, and fully operational process. Capacity can now be activated in under a minute, enabling immediate response to unplanned outages
The bank conducts multiple full capacity disaster recovery capability tests annually in Ankara using Flexible Capacity activations, , helping continuously validate recovery readiness, operational resilience, and business continuity while demonstrating compliance with regulatory requirements. This consistent testing ensures that recovery is not theoretical but proven under real-world scenarios.
By shifting from static recovery models to dynamic workload mobility, Garanti BBVA has strengthened operational resilience, reduced risk, and improved readiness against both natural disasters and system disruptions. Moving forward, IBM continues to support the bank as a strategic technology partner, helping enhance automation, scalability, and long-term resilience.
Founded in 1946 and headquartered in Türkiye, Garanti BBVA is one of Türkiye’s largest private banks and part of BBVA, a global financial group. Serving corporate, SME, retail and investment banking customers, the bank operates as an integrated financial services group with international reach and strong digital capabilities.
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