This bank is looking to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the digitization of the financial sector. It has a cloud-first strategy designed to ensure cost-efficient operations and reduce time to market for new services moving forward. To this end, it has embarked on an ambitious cloud migration plan to move from an on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based infrastructure for its business-critical applications.
The financial institution understands the importance of delivering service innovation and updates, particularly when it comes to customer-facing applications. This is accelerating its adoption of modern development methods to develop and test new offerings in the cloud.
As a result, the financial institution wanted to move its applications to Microsoft Azure and further enhance them. In addition, alongside this project it wanted to build new applications based on microservices. The bank approached its trusted partner Orange Business to help it on its migration journey and innovate new services.
Moving mission-critical apps to the cloud
Orange helped the bank identify which mission-critical applications could be moved immediately to Microsoft Azure from its data center, in accordance with governance and compliance. This also involved checking through its portfolio to see which applications could be discontinued, modernized or refactored using Azure services as building blocks. The financial institution was keen to move as many applications as possible to Azure as it sees the cloud as a platform for innovation and also for attracting next-generation developers.
As part of the process, Orange integrated components from the hyperscaler into the applications in partnership with the financial institution’s in-house application teams. Once deployed, Orange manages, operates and runs these application platforms in a shared responsibility model.
As a digital player already, the financial institution was fully au fait with security risks. It was, however, concerned with the forecast and management of costs. Carrying a FinOps approach on to traditional applications is not easy, and re-writing some of the applications in a cloud-native environment would have been too complex. Orange, however, worked very closely with the financial institution’s IT team to ensure a secure migration and proper cost analytics to predict future costs and potential adjustments to optimize.
The technology skills drought is a growing issue in the financial sector. The financial institution believes its adoption of the very latest version of cloud and building in cloud-native applications will also enable it to attract new talent, who want to work with the very latest technologies.
The financial institution is continuing its cloud-first journey and has seen the value of having a partner like Orange Business that understands its compliance landscape and has expertise in not only moving complex mission-critical applications to the cloud, but also rewiring and engaging in co-innovation to build new digital platforms from scratch.