The client

As one of the largest banks in the Nordics, with operations in Europe and the Americas, the client has over 1.7 million Internet banking users, of which approximately 76,000 are corporate customers.

The challenge

The bank was experiencing platform performance issues. As a large percentage of its business is conducted through digital channels, any extended outage would have a serious impact both on the business and its customers. Outages can also trigger regulatory fines and become a financial burden if they are more than infrequent.

The bank’s large customer base also made moving data inside and outside of the organisation and processing files a highly complex procedure, posing threats to data security.

Solution

SABREX performed an on-site 10-day Health Check Assessment.

The in-depth analysis revealed a common problem in enterprise IT; the business’ requirements had evolved over time but the environment was still set up to meet the business needs at the time when the system was deployed. The Health Check also identified potential security threats before these jeopardised data or triggered regulatory fines.

SABREX held a client workshop to discuss the pros and cons of different technical approaches to meeting the bank’s business requirements.
This included providing use cases on IBM Sterling Secure Proxy for consideration.

SABREX have found the product to be a successful solution to complex file processing in their experience with other large banks. Holding the workshop enables clients to make an informed decision which is right for their business and ensures the client’s IT investment meets their expectations.

After obtaining consensus, SABREX consultants worked closely with the customer team to plan the upgrade of applications and related components.

As well as supporting the customer team throughout the upgrade and conducting performance testing, SABREX handled the migration of the client’s partners and supervised the go-live. As a result, the entire process went smoothly with minimal disruption to business as usual.

Value

The customer’s highest priority was avoiding detrimental outages which SABREX achieved; our intervention made the infrastructure more resilient and capable of meeting its high availability requirements.

In addition to removing threats to security and compliance, the software upgrades undertaken improved the experience for end-users, as the product now functioned at the standard of modern business requirements.

Implementing IBM Sterling Secure Proxy meant that the bank was now able to meet new high-speed protocols for data transfer, reduce data vulnerability and meet security and compliance regulations at industry best practice standards.