Managed services help solve legacy modernization challenges 

Today’s business and retail banking customers expect fast, seamless banking and financial services across multiple digital platforms. As security technologies have matured, all users have become more familiar and comfortable with multichannel banking, and even corporate finance and treasury departments now expect a consumer-style user experience, speed and convenience.
 
However, many large banks and financial institutions find it challenging to keep pace with change while also preserving the security, reliability and availability of banking services. These organizations have typically built up their applications and the supporting infrastructure over years or even decades. And while their systems are undoubtedly robust, they can be costly to run and slow to adapt to new requirements. In addition, the increased processing and storage capacity of new technologies makes a compelling case for modernization, offering banks the opportunity to reduce operational costs, boost environmental performance, and improve the end-user experience.
 
Modernizing legacy systems is often considered to be costly, risky and time-consuming, and many financial organizations engage external specialists. Recognizing the power of this model, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) developed and offers fully managed IT infrastructure solutions.

In one specific example, TCS reviewed the challenge facing a leading bank in Israel. The bank’s legacy environment was costly to operate, and the system architecture could not scale up to meet the demands of increased workload.
 
As the legacy systems approached full capacity, response times showed first signs of degradation, affecting the bank’s core applications. High latency was causing delays between selecting an option on a mobile or online app and receiving a response, which was adversely impacting the experience for both corporate customers and consumer account-holders.
 
TCS proposed to resolve these latency and scalability issues by creating a new fully managed data storage service for the bank, built around IBM FlashSystem® 9500. TCS worked with Harel Information Technologies, one of the leading IT infrastructure providers in Israel and an IBM Business Partner, to source, configure and implement the FlashSystem technology. Based in Tel Aviv, Harel employs more than 100 IT specialists, offering a comprehensive range of business solutions, from rugged laptops and tablets to high-performance computing and cloud services.
 
The market-leading IBM FlashSystem 9500 storage solution provides the capacity and performance to manage exceptionally high transactional and data workloads, in addition to helping protect data from accidental loss or deliberate attack.
 
FlashSystem 9500 combines IBM FlashCore® Modules, NVMe architecture, and AI-powered features, and has the ability to detect and prevent potential cyberattacks in real time. For protection against ransomware, it uses IBM Cyber Vault to preserve air-gapped, read-only copies of data so that systems can be rapidly recovered if the production copy of data is encrypted by malware.
 
Built with scalability in mind, FlashSystem 9500 enables new capacity to be added without service disruption, up to a total of 4.5 PB in a 4U rack drawer. The deployment in this case covers three locations, with backup and recovery provided by the embedded tools provided by IBM FlashSystem.
 
Chen Kamer says, “It’s been a smooth journey working with IBM because of our strong global partnership that spans diverse technologies and domains, and its long history of excellence and reputation for reliability. Innovations such as the detection of malware in real time show how IBM is bringing capabilities from the highly respected mainframe world directly into modern IBM Power® servers and FlashSystem. In turn, TCS leverages those advantages, drawing on our worldwide expertise and experience to add fully managed services for global clients.”