Introduction
Our client is a multinational investment bank and financial services company based in Switzerland. Co-headquartered in the cities of Zürich and Basel, they maintain a presence in all major financial centers as the largest Swiss banking institution and private bank in the world. Apart from private banking, they provide wealth management, asset management and investment banking services for private, corporate and institutional clients with international services.
The Challenge
Cloud migration of bank applications
They wanted to migrate critical front-office Investment Banking (IB) applications to the Azure Cloud.
The Objective
Technology standardization and scalability
- Expedite the bank’s cloud adoption strategy
- Achieve technology standardization aligned with the client’s futuristic vision with the removal of legacy technology
- Realize scalability through cloud acceleration team, migration PODs across IB portfolio and larger bank’s ecosystem
- Consolidation, standardization and automation by containerization, integration with Enterprise Vault solution and heterogeneous database migration from Oracle 11g DBaaS to PostgreSQL
- Accomplish near-term and long-term cost savings coupled with effective visibility and control of costs
The Solution
Platform upgrade and database migration
- Upgrade to the latest Camel and Spring versions and migrate from RHEL 6.x, 7.x to AKS Linux Container
- Leverage PaaS services, such as AKS, Azure Key Vault, Azure Storage, Azure Monitor and Azure Log analytics
- Implement Azure AD for multi-factor authentication and secure identity management
- Migrate from Oracle 11g DBaaS to Azure-managed PostgreSQL
- Set up DevSecOps CI/CD pipelines for faster and more secure deployments using Azure DevOps and GitLab CI and enhancing the process of customers deploying applications
The Impact
Better management of operational overheads and security
- PaaS-first approach resulted in managing operational overheads better by containerization of applications to AKS, leveraging Azure DevOps
- Established security best practices by securely storing and managing sensitive information, such as keys, passwords and certificates across on-premises and cloud via HashiCorp Vault and Azure Key Vault
