Unifying data to support faster creation of new business services at a lower cost
Business Needs
As a major global provider of financial data services, this company’s core business is gathering, enriching, and delivering HR-compliance-related data to employers and personal credit data to lenders. Because the company had grown both organically and through a series of corporate acquisitions, data was distributed across more than 80 siloed systems, and some sets of data were duplicated and synchronized between systems using a variety of technologies. The lack of standardization made this approach costly, but more importantly, it hindered innovation, reduced security, and significantly increased the time to market for new services.
The company decided to pursue a cloud-first strategy to address these issues and strengthen its stance against emerging competitors. The plan included “brownfield” and “greenfield” elements: to migrate newer systems directly to the cloud wherever possible and completely rebuild legacy systems as cloud-native applications.
At this point, the challenge of moving approximately 50 billion records and more than 40,000 corporate customers became apparent. The complexity and the need to minimize disruption were even more significant than the sheer scale of the task. Many of the company’s data services are tightly integrated with customers’ internal systems: from loan origination software for mortgage brokers to point-of-sales networks in retail stores. With its customers’ workflows dependent on frictionless access to data services, the company needed to maximize availability during the planned three-year cloud migration and data modernization to enable data to be replicated flexibly in both directions during the more protracted process of rebuilding legacy applications.
A spokesperson for the company explains: “When you’re relying on customers to make changes as well, it’s tough to coordinate migration activity because those customers have their own priorities. Equally, you can build the best new system possible, but it’s useless if you can’t bring in all the historical data. We needed a way to break down this massive migration into manageable, reversible pieces.”
Accelerating data
modernization and reducing risk
The financial data services company chose Striim to accelerate its data modernization journey by enabling real-time streaming data from on-premises databases (predominantly Oracle) to diverse target technologies on Google Cloud. The Striim solution allows the company to perform a fast and accurate initial migration of historical data, then capture changes from the on-premises environment and stream them to the cloud environment. The company can then steadily move customers from the on-premises environment to the cloud. This approach also reduces risk, as the spokesperson explains: “When we move from Oracle to Google Cloud, we’re almost certainly going to be making many changes. If something goes wrong, we can’t afford to spend more than 30 minutes trying to fix it because there’s too much revenue at stake. Striim gives us the option of failing back to the on-premises environment with minimal impact on users.”
Industry:
Financial Services
Region:
United States
Challenges:
The leading financial data provider aimed to transform its operations in the cloud to increase agility, improve security, and streamline costs. The biggest challenge was accelerating the migration and rationalization of massive data volumes while avoiding service disruptions.
Solution:
Striim Platform on Google Cloud. The company uses Striim to build highly secure, smart data pipelines that continuously move data at scale, in real-time from any on-premise source to Google Cloud.
Benefits:
With Striim, the company was able to stage its cloud migration and data modernization initiatives to minimize disruption for their customers while accelerating time to market with products and services, reducing the risk of any service disruptions, and ultimately increasing top-line growth.
Results:
- Innovation – Launched multi-data asset-based products that would not otherwise have been possible.
- Efficiency – Significant reduction in time to run batches. One customer saw time decrease from roughly 100 hours to about an hour.
- Effectiveness – Top-line growth from innovation.
The company has set up bi-directional streaming between its on-premises systems and the new cloud landscape. This ensures that any new data created in the cloud is fed back to the appropriate systems that are still running in the on-premises data centers. It also makes it easier and less risky to rebuild existing systems as cloud-native applications because the company can fail back to the original systems in the event of any unexpected issues.
From the customers’ perspective, the seamless synchronization of data through Striim minimizes the impact of and potential risk of the cloud migration. In many cases, customers are using a combination of legacy on-premises systems, systems migrated as-is to the cloud, and newly built cloud-native applications—all maintained in perfect synchrony by Striim.
Delivering business value faster.
By migrating business-critical data from more than 80 siloed on-premises databases to the cloud, the company is taking a big step towards its vision of a single, seamless data store supporting all its applications. The transformation has already provided the opportunity to standardize data structures, reduce duplication and improve governance. Once everything is in the cloud, there will no longer be any technical barriers to combining data in new ways to deliver innovative insight to customers. Having a single data pool will also make managing data privacy, security, and compliance easier.
The company will achieve significant capital and operational cost savings once it can shut down its data centers. It will also substantially improve its security posture as patching the existing on-premises systems is hard. The company estimates it would have required years and millions of dollars of investment to reach the standards available as a turnkey service on the public cloud.
The spokesperson says: “In our cloud-first future, we’ll be able to react quickly to emerging requirements by assembling new services from existing components, allowing for the creation of compliant, multi-data products and solutions that have the potential to yield more powerful, predictive insights. We’ll also benefit from stronger security and streamlined operational costs. Striim has a major role in bringing us these new opportunities in an incremental, low-risk manner.”
Combining performance, accuracy, integrity, and security with rapid set-up and hands-off management, Striim is helping the company complete its ambitious and aggressive cloud transformation ahead of schedule. And as the company continues to acquire other businesses, it expects to use Striim to accelerate the ingestion of their data and realize value faster from the M&A activity.
Take the next step
Striim’s enterprise-grade, streaming integration with intelligence platform makes it easy to build continuous, streaming data pipelines—including change data capture (CDC)—to power real-time cloud integration, log correlation, edge processing, and streaming analytics. To find out more about how we could help your organization, visit striim.com
