European bank achieves major operational enhancements with entire IT estate cloud migration

European bank achieves major operational enhancements with entire IT estate cloud migration

Leading investment bank undertakes the largest business-change programme in FS history

As part of its ongoing cloud transformation programme, the bank asked cloud migration expert GFT to support with the re-architecture and migration of over two-dozen business-critical applications across the bank. In doing so, the bank will reduce costs, consolidate its IT infrastructure, and maximise its competitive advantage over the long-term.

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Time and cost-savings

A complete consolidation of IT architecture

Accelerated migration

Multiple business-critical applications migrated

Standardisation

Time-to-production significantly reduced

Background

More and more, the performance of banking institutions is determined not by their strategy or size, but by their technological capability. With >€1T AUM, this major European bank needed an IT infrastructure that was both powerful and agile enough to retain its competitive advantage for decades to come.

Yet with an IT estate hosted in on-prem data centres, the bank was facing several challenges, including:

No ability to scale store/compute capacity on demand.
High licencing costs.
Outdated technology.
Limited flexibility to add new features

Challenge

An IT infrastructure in need of modernisation

Keen to move away from ‘on-prem’ and commence its cloud journey, the bank enabled GCP services across its internal application teams from day one. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that these GCP services were not fully fit for the bank’s complex purposes. For example, GCP’s cloud services lacked some of the guardrails and security protocols required for financial services applications.

This ‘too much, too soon’ situation meant the bank’s application teams were unable to fully migrate applications to GCP and unable to plan their migration journey, as they had no control over GCP’s feature set and no idea when these services would be available in upper environments.

Without a solution, the migration would be slow, costly, and mired with unnecessary toil. To prevent this, the bank turned to its trusted partner GFT.

Engagement

Foundational transformation

With >100 cloud experts embedded within several of the bank’s most influential teams, GFT set about transforming the culture, processes, and technology of the customer’s IT infrastructure. This included:

Lightning-fast discovery: The team analysed and classified over two-dozen applications in a rapid discovery process that was completed in just ten weeks, eclipsing the customers’ expected timeframe.

Accelerated migration: GFT built Landing Zones, developed best practice CI/CD in GitHub Actions, consulted on native cloud development, assisted both microservices and data migrations, and navigated internal app teams through architecture reviews.

GCP Landing Zones: GFT and Google collaborated closely in bringing multiple, first-of-their-kind applications to life within GCP. To date, GFT and customer’s internal cloud team have delivered well over 100 fully automated GCP Landing Zones, which has allowed the bank to leverage the capabilities of numerous GCP services through a secure infrastructure delivery pipeline.

Benefit

Far-reaching strategic impact

GFT’s work is having a far-reaching, strategic impact for the customer. While the project remains underway, GFT has delivered major successes already, including:

Cost and time-savings: GFT have supported a total consolidation of architecture, assisting the bank in avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring a handful of repeatable blueprint variations are deployed across the application portfolio.

Accelerated migration: GFT has successfully re-architectured/migrated multiple business-critical applications to date, more than any other vendor involved in the programme.

Standardisation: The bank is now equipped with standardised processes to streamline the GCP migration. Thus, time-to-production is reduced significantly, risk is massively reduced thanks to in-built regulatory controls, and release times have been expedited.

"GFT have been the differentiator in the successful delivery of our cloud programme and strategy."

Senior leader

Client

European Bank

Conclusion

A blueprint for future FS migrations to GCP

As many of GCP’s native services and products are not designed for use by financial services institutions, the bank and GCP found themselves in unknown territory. Clearly, without a ready-made, off-the-shelf cloud solution available, GFT would have to bring all its experience to bear in creating one.

GFT used its deep financial services knowledge to inform Google’s service provision across multiple applications and products. This included changing several products to allow for more tightly controlled network security and adding CMEK (customer-managed encryption key) options to other products.