After a global bank completed the acquisition of a European business, a legacy corporate payments platform was inherited. The platform hadn't been upgraded for several years and it was showing its age.
The platform had a very high value of corporate transactions flowing though the European-based systems every single day. Reliability was a significant issue with multiple hardware and software issues occurring each month. The quality of service provided to corporate customers demanded a rapid and significant response.
The European business used a 3rd party provider to maintain it's key payments platform. The "break-fix" nature of the service contract meant that little or no preventative maintenance had been performed on this complex platform for many years.
The stability of the service was failing to meet SLA obligations, with incidents becoming a regular and unwelcome reality for staff and customers alike. Knowledge of how the system worked was diminishing as the inevitable organisational changes unfolded..
A technology refresh on a critical business system of this scale represents a huge feat of planning, organisation and orchestration. From the outset, the strategy was to adopt a low-risk approach, implementing a series of incremental changes. Time was the biggest challenge - both in terms of the need to get the job done as quickly as possible and the restrictive constraints in terms of planned downtime to facilitate this essential work.
The scope of work was as follows:
ICEFLO consultants led and delivered the project, working closely with the clients staff and 3rd parties. The first challenge was to document and fully rehearse the shutdown and start-up procedures, capturing the steps, owners and timings in detailed runbooks. Test environments were used to achieve this level of understanding before any attempt was made to upgrade Production.
Anonymous, Head of Global Transaction Services
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