Like many organizations, financial services companies identify digital transformation as a top business priority. But their journey may be more complicated, as their infrastructures are often a blend of legacy platforms and processes, with core software built on proprietary vendors’ technology, and app development practices still tied – at least to some extent – to waterfall methodologies. 

Financial services firms are facing real challenges that, while somewhat germane to all companies on a digitization journey, may be hitting them a little harder. For example, the cost of long-term contracts with proprietary software vendors continue to increase, while limiting their flexibility to accomodate ever-evolving market demands. . 

Because  of costs of these commodity  infrastructure and application architectures – which, by the way, rarely drive competitive differentiation – we’ve observed an increase in agile procurement as a means to alleviate these issues.

Cloud-native technologies, along with DevOps, are additional considerations that can help reduce the time to deliver applications. With the realization of cloud computing benefits, data center capacity and capability has become more elastic, scaling across private and public clouds as needed.  But how else can they save money and significantly increase their investments in digital transformation?

FSI data from the recent State of Enterprise Open Source Report reveals, 93% of financial services organizations believe that open source technologies are strategically important for current and future plans. Many of these enterprises recognize that adopting containers and microservices, using an enterprise Linux platform, makes it possible to get cloud-native – and revenue-producing – apps to market faster. Plus, these workloads are often less expensive to create and maintain.

Getting over the big hurdle

The migration of workloads to open source architectures can be intimidating, given that there may be tens of thousands of virtual machines (VMs) in operation. Indeed, they must be analyzed to determine whether they can and should be “lifted and shifted” to less expensive platforms, refactored and perhaps containerized,  or left alone in their current state. 

The prospect of such extensive analysis traditionally has been a huge barrier to entry, but that’s changing. Red Hat’s new Migration Analytics service, for instance, makes it easy and seamless for banks to discover what’s in their environments. It provides summaries of how easy or difficult it might be to move VMs, or perform other app or container migrations, to an enterprise Linux platform to reduce operational complexity and costs. 

Once migration targets are prioritized, Red Hat offers a variety of online migration tools, such as Application Migration Toolkit (AMT), Infrastructure Migration (IMS), and Cluster Application Migration (CAM) , as well as Consulting services, to allow for mass workload migrations. Visit the Red Hat Modernization and Migration Solutions page for full information on all available options, resources, and tools.

Using our methodology to architect, automate, and execute large-scale business-critical workload migrations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based platforms opens the door for companies to achieve cost reductions. That frees up money to reinvest in transformative technologies such as multi-cloud management, automation, containers and application modernization – the touchpoints of a digital organization. 

Red Hat customers that have achieved big workload migration successes include BBVA, Produban, and Paychex

  • For global financial group BBVA, the move to OpenShift and OpenStack means teams can develop an idea quickly and eliminate distractions from innovation and discovery. Ninety-five percent of its infrastructure is now running on OpenStack and OpenShift. 

  • Produban, Grupo Santander's technology company, has migrated 9,000 servers to Enterprise Linux so far, and it will eventually take all of its workloads there. The company says it now has an operating system base that meets all its needs in terms of growth, scalability, security, and corporate support. 

  • IT development teams using OpenShift at leading payroll and HR provider Paychex on average produce three or four times more product deployments than before. That equates to more features launching to its end users faster.

Our services organization works closely with companies – like yours – and is interested in learning more about your specific migration journey. Together, we can utilize a free one-day discovery session designed to explore your environment as well as organizational goals - and to craft a step-by-step plan for long term success. A number of specific technical considerations are examined with a broader goal of cataloging all of your VMs, defining migration priorities, jointly moving target workloads, and ultimately, empowering your team for migration at scale.


About the author

Gordon Tillmore leads Product Marketing for Red Hat’s Horizontal Solutions team. Throughout his tenure at Red Hat, he has served as a Product Marketing Manager for many Red Hat products and technologies, and he also led the Account-Based Marketing and Services Marketing teams. A graduate of the University of Virginia and American University, Gordon resides in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife and son.

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