Secure Your Database. Simplify Backup Access.

Every institution backs up its core banking database. That part is solved.

The difficulty starts when someone needs to look at what is inside one.

A customer queries a transaction from eight months ago. Internal audit wants to review a period. A regulator asks for historical records. Operations needs figures that are no longer in the live system. Every one of those requests turns into the same sequence: raise it with IT, ask the core banking provider for a backup, find somewhere to restore it, and wait while a database administrator does the work.

Nobody wants the shortcut either, which is querying the live core banking database directly. On a production banking system that is a performance risk and an integrity risk, and most IT policies correctly forbid it.

So the data is protected, and it is useless. It exists, but it cannot answer a question this week.

BankGuard is an enterprise database backup and controlled data-access platform. It takes the backup your core banking provider already produces and turns it into a system your team can actually query.

You upload a link to your backup file. BankGuard retrieves it, restores it into a secure environment, and gives your authorised staff read-only access through a web portal. They find what they need themselves. Your production system is never touched.

This is worth stating plainly, because it is the first question a bank's security team asks.

BankGuard does not connect into your network. It does not hold credentials to your core banking system. It does not require a VPN link, a firewall exception, or an inbound route of any kind. The flow is one-directional and initiated by you: you provide a link to a backup file, and BankGuard works from that file alone.

BankGuard accepts both of the backup types institutions actually run:

• Daily differential backups, so the data stays close to current.
• End-of-month full backups, for period-end review and reporting.

The platform retains your most recent uploaded backup, so there is always a current restored copy available to query.

Beyond lookup, BankGuard generates reports and exports data from the restored database.

One use of this deserves particular mention. When an institution changes its core banking application, extracting clean historical data from the outgoing system is usually the hardest and most expensive part of the move. BankGuard already holds a restored, queryable copy of that data and can produce extracts for migration directly. A platform bought for day-to-day data access turns out to solve the problem everyone dreads.

• Role-based access control, so staff see only what their role permits.
• Two-factor authentication on sign-in.
• Session management.
• Secure access over HTTPS.
• Comprehensive audit logging across the application, recording activity for internal review and regulatory evidence.
• Read-only by design. Data in BankGuard cannot be altered through the portal.

Database engine: Microsoft SQL Server. This is currently the only engine supported for restore.

What you provide: a link to your database backup file, supplied by your core banking application provider. Nothing else is required from your infrastructure.

BankGuard was built for financial institutions, and it fits wherever the same conditions apply: a Microsoft SQL Server database that matters, records that must stay available for review, and rules about who may see what.

• Microfinance banks that need customer and transaction records available for review without exposing the core banking system, and whose backups sit with a third-party core banking provider.
• Commercial banks and payment companies with regulatory reporting obligations and production systems that cannot absorb ad-hoc queries.
• Any regulated organisation running MSSQL where an auditor can request historical records and expect them promptly.

BankGuard is in production use with a Nigerian microfinance bank today.

It is developed by Premise2Cloud, whose Managing Director has spent more than 25 years across Nigerian financial services and technology, including Allstates Trust Bank (now Ecobank), National Sports Lottery and SystemSpecs, and has advised several Nigerian microfinance banks on technology, operations, security and regulatory requirements. The product exists because the problem was seen from the inside.