Powering a Financial Services Regulators’ digital transformation

Through strategic data center transformation, HCLTech enables the institution to achieve operational excellence and future-ready financial system agility

10 min read

The Overview

A leading European central banking institution plays a critical and indispensable role within the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), safeguarding monetary stability and ensuring the integrity of the Irish financial system. Recognizing the imperative to future-proof its operations in a demanding digital landscape, the institution launched a strategic modernization program to establish an industry-leading core infrastructure.

This collaboration was centered on delivering an ultra-resilient, highly secure data center architecture. It was engineered to achieve peak operational stability and ensure unwavering compliance with strict European mandates, including GDPR and ISO standards. The resulting foundation is designed not just for continuity, but for sustainable, robust growth.

The Challenge

Building a foundation for future service robustness

The institution proactively identified and pursued a transformation to reinforce its operational platform, ensuring its readiness to meet future demands:

Enhancing operational quality: To meet its critical mandate, it sought a partner aligned with its vision for unwavering service robustness and peak operational stability, ensuring future-ready control over all core systems.
Infrastructure for the future: A forward-thinking program was launched to modernize core infrastructure, eliminating potential lifecycle risks and elevating the institution’s technology to meet the highest global standards for security and stability.
Enabling dynamic growth: The transformation focused on building an automated and scalable environment that allows the institution to rapidly innovate and deploy new services, thereby enhancing its agility across the European financial ecosystem.

The Solution

Accelerating the path to hyper-resilience

HCLTech was chosen as the strategic partner to execute this vital, high-stakes project. The comprehensive mandate included delivering an end-to-end managed service encompassing DC hosting, network, compute, storage, security, monitoring and ITSM tools.

Key pillars of a robust transformation:

Strategic Data Center (DC) overhaul: HCLTech successfully novated the contracts for the original DCs to maintain service, while simultaneously constructing 2 new DCs; 1 in the same facility as the original primary DC and another at a greenfield secondary DC. The workloads from the original DCs were then seamlessly migrated to the new DCs in waves with no unplanned impacts.
Accelerated stability: Demonstrating exceptional execution, the entire service landscape was transitioned in an accelerated 13-month timeline, rapidly securing the environment and elevating service reliability.
Modernization and compliance: A complete refresh of all core assets was executed, establishing a platform that meets the Tier 3-rated infrastructure standard and is fully compliant with all requisite regulatory mandates.
Standardized scalability: The new architecture standardized institution's technology on enterprise-class platforms, enabling dynamic and frictionless scaling to support future digital initiatives.

The Impact

Unlocking future stability and service excellence

The collaboration with HCLTech has delivered transformative, measurable results, significantly enhancing the institution’s operational resilience and positioning it for sustained success:

Key outcome area	Delivered result
Systemic resilience	Configuration moved to a robust Active-Active model, ensuring seamless and immediate failover capability.
Operational control	Achieved Zero P1/P2 incidents, demonstrating peak control and an unwavering focus on operational stability.
Service consistency	Secured 100% SLA compliance across the complex portfolio of managed services, validating service robustness.
Financial assurance	Executed the first flawless SWIFT Failover in institution’s history, a critical validation of the platform’s systemic stability for core payment infrastructure.
Security posture	Reduced security risk exposure by 61%, actively addressing the vulnerability backlog to strengthen the institution's digital defenses.

Sustained governance and transparency

The success is founded on a rigorous governance model that prioritizes transparency and proactive risk mitigation:

Proactive Intelligence: New monitoring and reporting tools provide the institution with granular, real-time insights into system health, allowing for a strategic shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, intelligence-driven operational management.
Strategic risk clarity: The provision of a detailed security heat map offers the institution executive team complete transparency into the infrastructure's posture, enabling informed, collaborative security decision-making.

This partnership has successfully delivered a fully compliant, hyper-resilient digital foundation, empowering the leading European central bank to confidently fulfill its crucial mandate and maintain future stability within the European financial system.