Case Study: Société Générale Luxembourg Transforms Core Banking Systems with Cloud Migration by Astadia
Astadia moves core banking systems to the private cloud for Société Générale Bank and Trust.
A success story from Astadia, an Amdocs company.
About the customer
Société Générale Bank & Trust (SGBT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Société Générale Group, one of the leading financial service groups in the euro zone. Founded in Luxembourg in 1893, it is the oldest foreign bank in the Grand Duchy.
As a commercial bank from the very outset, SGBT has accompanied Luxembourg’s business and industrial community throughout its growth, thereby contributing to the emergence of the Luxembourg financial marketplace. In strengthening its international focus, it has acquired a full complement of multi-business banking solutions, and also offers products and services designed especially for institutional investors (securities services) and high net worth individuals (private banking), backed by an active trading room.
The project
Seeking to move away from the constraints of its legacy infrastructure and gain scalability for future growth, SGBT sought to migrate its mission-critical banking systems to a cloud computing architecture. The migration would take just over two years of preparation and testing, requiring close collaboration between experts from Astadia, now an Amdocs company, and system specialists from SGBT.
The project scope encompassed applications with ten million lines of code, spread over seventeen thousand programs and six thousand screens developed in Natural 4GL. These applications used a significant amount of data that was managed on the mainframe in Adabas databases and ISAM indexed files. The programs made extensive use of the transaction processing and batch environments of the mainframe with 12,000 jobs and many proprietary utilities. The tools provided by Astadia offered an automation rate of 99.99% for the migration phase.
Learn more about Adabas-Natural migrations
With such an extensive codebase, the active management of testing was critical to keep the project on track. Business users were needed to ultimately accept the new systems. Guaranteeing functional validation of the programs prior to burdening the business with testing was an important prerequisite for the resource planning of the bank.
To address this issue, Astadia deployed its TestMatch solution for automating testing, which streamlined the process by capturing test scenarios from production traces and enabling real-time multi-channel replay and comparison of original and replayed streams.
"TestMatch offers automated recording and replay of complete scenarios or individual sessions and it can be used for both functional testing and stress testing. The product goes as far as providing detailed analysis of response times and throughput, and also contains helpful utilities to detect performance problems. It produces test scenario coverage statistics and the pass rate of replayed scenarios."
"The migration of our mainframe system gave us the opportunity to move these mission-critical applications to the bank's private cloud. Our private cloud has facilitated the delivery of different environments, and was able to allocate resources to virtual machines where needed, thanks to its flexibility."
Today, the target system runs on a modern environment with Oracle RAC as database, and COBOL application servers on a fully virtualized Linux platform provided by VCE. Globally, the new infrastructure is based on six virtual machines for the application part, and four virtual machines for the Oracle RAC database. In addition, the developers are using "drag and drop" gestures to maintain the migrated code in a standard Eclipse IDE, which the bank also hosts on a virtual desktop infrastructure.
"The mainframe applications fully addressed the needs of business for many years. The migration let us preserve the investment in the existing system, while adding value by moving it to a scalable, open environment."
Solution benefits
By migrating its core business applications to a scalable, open environment, SGBT achieved significant operational benefits. They also realized substantial efficiency gains through TestMatch, which automated the comparison of functionality and performance between old and new systems, saving hundreds of work-days while enhancing the overall quality of testing.
The methodology and tools used for this migration delivered the following additional benefits:
- Minimal risks
- Minimal change management
- No business interruption
- Short duration
- No user re-training, as the migrated application is functionally equivalent to the original application
As part of Amdocs, Astadia continues to provide industry-leading mainframe modernization and testing solutions for financial institutions worldwide.
Get in touch with our experts and learn how we can help your organization migrate business applications in a seamless, automated process.