Major investment bank migrates from Oracle to Azure Postgres

Major investment bank migrates from Oracle to Azure Postgres

Automated pipeline lowers costs, reduces complexity and enables smooth migration to cloud

Reduce reliance on Oracle, increase business agility and decrease TCO. This global investment bank wanted to reduce costs, transform legacy applications and shrink its data center footprint.

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GFT service

Platform development – 5 FTEs for 8 months

Speed

Rapid deployment of new projects and services

Innovative

Leading activities for bank’s cloud transformation

Challenge

Reduce reliance on Oracle, increase business agility and decrease TCO

This global investment bank wanted to reduce costs, transform legacy applications and shrink its data center footprint. Specific concerns were:

Databases utilizing a lot of hardware, storage and specialized personnel. This, along with typically high license costs, meant they were a prime target for cost reduction and transformation
Oracle installations tend to be complex and are not cloud-friendly, so a secondary aim was to reduce this complexity by using cloud-ready database PaaS offerings

Engagement

Infrastructure as code and automated schema and data conversion/migration

GFT had worked with the bank on a number of successful projects and was engaged to:

Design and implement two new pipelines to deliver a smooth, staged conversion and migration to Azure
Incorporate several open-source database tools into a custom pipeline to facilitate database discovery, schema and code conversion, data migration and custom testing
Agree to and document state-of-the-art security standards and baseline with CSO while adding new Azure policies
Integrate with a number of on-premises systems for secret management, logging and monitoring (Azure monitor to Splunk)
Ensure high availability and DR in the design and pipelines to ensure production-readiness
Define target operating model with bank’s COO team

Benefit

Enabled self-service database migrations, including schema and data

Working in a new cloud environment, the bank has boosted its agility and can begin new projects sooner. This is made possible by:

An offline blueprint that allows application teams to re-use the GFT template to migrate databases without external assistance
A flexible pipeline that can be further customized for bespoke transformations
Automated best-practice database provisioning with all bank security standards baked in