Modernizing Financial Institutions Data in Private Cloud

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, financial institutions face unprecedented challenges in managing complex data environments reliably, efficiently and with the ability to scale seamlessly. Core banking modernization has become a fundamental imperative to catalyze digital transformation initiatives and deliver superior customer experiences. 

We recognize these intricate challenges at World Wide Technology (WWT) and propose a strategic approach aligning with industry best practices. 

The road ahead for financial data 

As financial institutions digitally transform, their data management requirements are evolving rapidly. Increasing transaction volumes, demand for real-time data access, stringent regulatory compliance and escalating cybersecurity threats are creating immense pressure on existing data infrastructure. Legacy monolithic platforms were not designed to handle today's scale and complexity securely and efficiently. This compromises the operational resilience and agility required to rapidly roll out innovative data-driven services. 

To maintain their competitive edge, banks urgently need to modernize their data backbone through a calibrated transition from legacy system architectures. This enables them to enhance system reliability, preemptively detect issues through intelligent monitoring, and scale elastically to meet demand fluctuations - all while reducing technical debt through automation. 

Modernization strategy 

At the forefront, we recommend adopting a focused "Precision" modernization strategy targeting prioritized product lines over compressed 2-year cycles. This concentrated approach enables you to decisively penetrate strategic market opportunities or swiftly address perceived product shortcomings. Leading institutions pursuing such surgical, high-value deployments have realized accelerated returns on investment and faster go-to-market timelines compared to traditional monolithic, enterprise-wide programs.  

Complementing this, we advise fortifying your architectural foundations through the "Undercover" approach of elevating bank service orchestration standards and API-enabled data fabric integration. Embracing open industry specifications like BIAN's Coreless Banking framework alongside modern distributed cloud databases like MongoDB and CockroachDB enhances interoperability, reducing complexities across partner ecosystems. This architectural flexibility optimally positions you to capitalize on emerging paradigms like open banking and embedded finance ecosystems. 

Operational excellence 

From an operations perspective, institutionalizing an "automation-first" mindset using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) principles is paramount. Continuous enforcement of desired state configurations through policy-as-code eliminates insidious manual drift. Intelligent monitoring combined with noise-filtering alert systems tailored to isolating signals enables proactive detection and remediation before issues impact services. Our experience modernizing big data environments with platforms like Hadoop allows us to implement advanced monitoring, separating critical signals from noise across your data estate.

Fostering a "blameless" collaborative culture through transparent cross-functional retrospectives promotes a virtuous cycle of continuous learning and improvement. Regular knowledge-sharing between stakeholders prevents counterproductive silos and accommodates the rapid cadence of technological evolution. 

Case studies 

Rationalizing a complex legacy environment 

Our engagement with a global financial markets firm highlights our prowess in infrastructure modernization. The client needed to rationalize their disparate legacy IT estate resulting from multiple mergers and acquisitions. Their goals were to minimize costs, streamline systems and reduce the data center footprint. 

WWT designed an automation solution leveraging network discovery to accurately identify compute, network and storage device status across the fragmented environment. Our proprietary Python decision engine performed data modeling, providing a consolidated, auditable view of asset lifecycle and performance metrics.  

We collaborated closely with the client's infrastructure and operations teams to develop data visualization dashboards offering valuable insights into device trends, usage patterns and hardware analytics. Our lifecycle management capabilities facilitated environment optimizations. 

This engagement demonstrated WWT's ability to modernize complex legacy environments through unified visibility and data-driven decision-making. Our solution delivered over $1.5 million in cost savings for the client, reduced their operational carbon footprint, and enhanced data quality through cleansed CMDB records. 

Building a modern data platform for analytics   

A university engaged WWT to architect and deploy a foundational Microsoft Azure-based data lake and warehouse for enterprise reporting and analytics. The core objectives were to eliminate data silos, create visualizations and perform analysis from a single source, and enable data democratization across the organization. 

WWT took a business use case-driven approach, continuously delivering tangible value by integrating data sources according to business priorities identified through collaborative workshops. Data pipelines streamlined integrations from various on-premises and cloud sources into an Azure-based data lake. A curated data warehouse layer enabled self-service reporting via Power BI for the first time. 

Access controls, data masking, and the Azure Purview governance solution provided necessary data privacy and understanding. WWT's expertise helped rapidly operationalize a centralized modern data platform, unlocking insights previously trapped in silos. 

Final thoughts 

Core banking modernization is a fundamental prerequisite for catalyzing transformational digital journeys. Our recommended focused, multi-speed modernization roadmap, complemented by a resilient, continually improving collaborative operations philosophy, will fortify your competitive market leadership.   

Our seasoned experts, encompassing cloud data engineering guides, are committed partners who advise and implement at every stage of this strategic undertaking. We welcome the opportunity to discuss specific transformation roadmaps tailored to your strategic objectives and operational realities. Together, we can modernize seamlessly to redefine the digital banking paradigm.