Blade Watch

There’s been a lot happening in the banking sector in the last few quarters, we’ve seen the number of banks and financial organizations reduce as organizations were merged or bought out during the various announcements and market activities. The first thing we’ll see from these deals is the inventory and integration of systems, coupled with the onboarding and decommissioning, as we try and rationalize not only the infrastructure but the applications we have to operate, evolve and support.

I’ll use banka and bankb to illustrate the case, banka has bought a similar sized bank, bankb and is integrating its systems, the tasks we would take (off the top of my head) are:

• Inventory of bankb’s businesses – what are core to that banks’ activities and identified or not supported through banka’s business, subsidiary/partner/in-house applications  – what duplicate applications do we have, which generates the most revenue, (though often the buyer keeps their applications and keeps the bit it wants from the company its buying)
• Inventory of the applications with their feeds/services/servers/storage and networks and the associated data center space/power requirements with their security requirements – accounts/domains
• Identify data center space savings against requirements, for example if I take bankb’s application servers and move them to my data center, what space do I need, what will that leave with me, what’s the migration timeline? How long do we need to keep the data center for bankb online and the related infrastructure, understanding that we can’t just delete a domain overnight, that some infrastruture will need to be brought over.
• Identify differences in standards and configurations – for example what technical/non-technical issues might create a barrier to success?

Against all this activity, part of the project to integrate will involve:

• What systems are in scope – what network/SAN storage/feeds are needed to migrate on a per server basis
• What systems can be simply moved, anything say less than five years old (it will have lights out) – how that fits with the business units
• What systems can be virtualized or supplied on new hardware with an existing or new build but still possibly operating on a legacy network

What’s the long term strategy?

• Standardize bankb’s platforms to be in line with your standards – possibly migrating on to your build, your network, on your approved platforms/configurations
• Normalize configurations in line with your standards so we have parity across the estate
• Work towards standardizing application configurations and best practice – again for parity across the applications
• Consolidate data centers, fewer data centers, onboard bankb users to your network, your desktop platforms and decommission legacy platforms and configurations

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