Multinational Bank Achieves 10x Value From AWS Migration
This multinational bank sought to speed its time to market, improve the customer experience and grow operational and financial efficiency by migrating critical customer-facing applications and supporting data platforms to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-native services.
NTT DATA migrated the financial institution’s applications and data platform to a microservices architecture in AWS, conducting a thorough assessment, technology mapping and application modernization that takes full advantage of cloud-native benefits.
Business Needs
As one of the largest banking institutions in the United States, this organization has several million customer accounts under management and sought to ensure the ongoing satisfaction of these customers. With the pandemic urging more people to access banking services digitally, the bank looked to improve digital experience and achieve accurate and actionable entitlement data for its customers and affiliates.
The bank determined that migrating key customer-facing applications and supporting data platforms to AWS would help achieve these primary goals while also helping improve operational efficiency by eliminating these over-engineered applications and data platforms as they move to cloud-native services. Moreover, the bank expected the migration to speed time to market and grow financial efficiency.
Outcomes
- Achieves 360-degree view of customer portfolios
- Cuts time to market by 50%
- Eliminates over-developed applications and data platforms
- Improves the customer experience
- Realizes three times improvement in operational efficiency
- Saves 80% in service-related costs
Solution
Assessing dependencies
An NTT DATA team comprised of banking industry and cloud technology experts began by conducting a 12-factor application and data platform rationalization and assessment of dependencies. From here, the advisory team determined the best AWS native services and managed services components.
Application Migration
Originally built using Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), the applications to be migrated went through a process wherein the NTT DATA team established a Dockerfile images repository in Docker Hub along with dependencies—including database services, the messaging service and exposed ports. From here, environment variables were passed to the container as part of the task/container definition.
The team imported images to the Docker Hub image registry as well as GitHub, Nexus and the AWS container registry. The images were tagged to ensure image version control and were then exported to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). In sum, the NTT DATA team created 960 microservices from the migrated applications, helping each take advantage of cloud-native functionality like AWS autoscaling. For example, the team optimized the applications by updating configurations with little to no refactoring to best leverage AWS services.
In addition, the team used:
- Ansible as the deployment platform
- Docker as the CI/CD platform
- OpenShift for release lifecycle management
- Amazon Athena as the data pipe
- 500 AWS Lambda functions and
- 150 AWS Step Functions to automate ETL processes
By automating these processes, the bank cut in half the time it takes to bring new functionality and services to market.
Data Platform Migration
The data platforms supporting these applications were also migrated to AWS. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is now used to store content that is served to the bank’s clients via the AWS content delivery service Amazon CloudFront. Data is cached and stored using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). The bank has achieved a new level of insights thanks to Elastic, whose Logstash tool ingests and centralizes the flow of data, transforming it for analysis by Elasticsearch. The marriage of Elastic and AWS solutions has empowered this banking leader to aggregate and analyze customer data at scale, finding important trends and patterns that will help it identify new opportunities to further enhance customer experiences.
Security
As a financial institution that holds trillions in assets, the need for advanced security is mission critical. To help facilitate this required level of security, the NTT DATA team encrypted sensitive values by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Systems Manager Parameter Store, which provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management.
In addition, the teams deployed AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and role-based access best practices to help enforce the principle of least privilege access and simplify auditing and reporting. With the help of bots and sniffers, the security environment is continuously monitored to ensure it remains in a known, compliant state so that it meets operational, security and regulatory requirements.
These components all combine to provide security as a service for a seamless customer experience.
AWS Migration Benefits
With the move to an AWS microservices environment, the firm improved its operational efficiency by three times, while ensuring the utmost security of migrated systems. In addition, over-engineered applications and data platforms were turned into streamlined cloud-native services that take full advantage of AWS’s operational and financial efficiencies. For example, what once cost $1.50 per service to run now costs 30 cents, an 80% savings. And, even more importantly, it can now gain new insights with a 360-degree view into customer portfolios. Altogether, the AWS migration has freed the bank’s critical resources to focus on delivering new experiences to its customers, keeping up with their changing needs and ensuring their ongoing loyalty and lifetime value.
About Multinational Bank
NTT DATA migrated more than 25 applications written in Pivotal Cloud Foundry to AWS, consuming approximately 950 microservices for this company's global consumer bank functionalities. The result: the firm reached 25% higher production stability.