Major investment bank migrates from Oracle to Azure Postgres

Reduce reliance on Oracle, increase business agility and decrease TCO
This global investment bank wanted to reduce costs, transform legacy applications and shrink its datacentre footprint. Specific concerns were:

• Databases utilising a lot of hardware, storage and specialised personnel. This, along with typically high licence 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

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 and document state-of-the-art security standards and baseline with CSO while adding new Azure policies
• Integrate with a number of on-premise 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

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 customised for bespoke transformations
• Automated best-practice database provisioning with all bank security standards baked in