European bank transformation

Banking opportunity

One leading European Bank who has been a pillar of stability for millions of commercial and retail customers for more than 100 years, has an ambitious vision for modernisation and innovation.

A new approach would allow for better customer service accountability, whilst laying a strong foundation for growth, lowering customer costs and improving capital efficiency.

Technical challenge

To build the unique fintech platforms the CEO envisioned, they needed a fit-for-purpose cloud strategy that struck the right balance between public and private cloud as a starting point for modernisation and remediated legacy technical debt hosted on non-strategic traditional platforms.

Done correctly, this hybrid cloud approach would optimise agility and security by ensuring the right workloads were on the right platforms, to be transformed and modernised. Moving systems from non-strategic platforms into closer proximity to the public cloud environment would aid in the optimisation effort, giving access to wider public cloud capabilities and modernisation potential.

Our solution

With a successful technology partnership dating back to 2017, Kyndryl was chosen to plan, design, build and operate the hybrid cloud environment, and to deliver the migration of workloads.

Together with partners Microsoft and VMware, Kyndryl created a successful proof of concept to demonstrate the extension of the private cloud and migration of workloads into Microsoft Azure VMware Solution (AVS). After validation testing, Kyndryl configured an AVS private cloud environment within the Azure public cloud and led the migration of more than 3,500 workloads over a 6-month period, with zero downtime or business interruption. In the course of this migration, Kyndryl worked with the bank to highlight workloads that could be decommissioned rather than migrated, introducing additional efficiencies.

The power of partnership

Close collaboration with honest communication enabled the partners to successfully problem-solve together.

Microsoft brought deep knowledge of its Azure VMware Solution (AVS) offering, Azure cloud architecture, capabilities and performance, and other customer experiences moving to the platform.

The VMware team brought insight, expertise and experience of infrastructure/VMware-led workload migrations, leveraging the power of VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX).

What progress looks like

Migration of more than 3,500 workloads in six months with zero downtime or business disruption.
Improved performance immediately incurred in the new environment, including halving average application load times, and more than 60% reduction in time for some batch job runs.
Significant cost savings achieved through reduced use of legacy non-strategic platforms, and evolution of current private cloud to have a public cloud footprint in AVS.
Repeatable rapid migration approach proven, offering a phased modernisation approach that can help mitigate bank legacy support costs and risks progressively.
The evolution of the bank’s private cloud to move closer to the public cloud, along with the proven migration methodology, is now enabling planning for the remaining legacy environment (more than 15,000 additional workloads) to follow the same approach.