Oracle Cloud@Customer: the foundations of Retail Banking

New banking infrastructure

A major European leading bank for financial services and retail banking, with head offices in Italy and France, has begun a process of modernising its database management infrastructure with the aim of renewing existing on-premises systems.

The need for a more efficient and reliable IT infrastructure to manage the growth of data, applications and services in the various business processes, following the integration into the group of new banking institutions, required a solution that would allow, on one hand, greater computational power, and on the other hand to simplify and automate recurring management processes from the point of view of the operational management of databases.

Exadata Cloud@Customer

After years of using an On-Premise solution, the customer has renewed their confidence in a variant of the Oracle Exadata system, Cloud@Customer, that combines the power of the Oracle database platform with the simplicity, agility and elasticity of implementing a Private Cloud within its Data Centre.

In pursuing its digital transformation path, the customer relied on Red Reply's to design and implement an architectural solution based on two Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer engineered systems, finding a perfect synthesis between the governance of the On-Premise data and the performance and flexibility of a cloud deployment; the first of the two Exadata systems was dedicated to the production environment and the second to minor environments and Disaster Recovery, both located at proprietary and separate customer locations.

The benefits of the solution


The introduction of configurable IT resources in the Cloud environment has led to advantages such as increased performance with Exadata, the ability to dynamically adapt computational resources, the simplification of database management through automated interfaces, active monitoring to prevent problems and the reduction of operating and infrastructure management costs.
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The adoption of this new Deployment brought a number of side benefits with it that have since been positively reflected in the customer's business chain:

  • upgrade and consolidation of multiple databases in individual containers, divided by application areas, which have brought operational and resource savings benefits;

  • ensuring security on sensitive data and achieving compliance with European GDPR privacy and regulation with the introduction of encryption on physical data;

  • improving the availability of services even in non-critical environments with the use of distributed services;

  • better computational load balancing in favour of primary sites with Disaster Recovery

The challenges faced

The biggest challenges Red Reply faced were both ensuring full compatibility of pre-existing applications with the new Cloud platform and ensuring a migration process with a near-zero level of application disruption.

This was possible by uniting the combined potential of the Exadata @Customer engineered system and Oracle Data Guard features with a migration model designed ad hoc by Red Reply. Migration has enabled the Cloud Adoption process to be structured and automated, ensuring transparency of operation to applications, as well as migration speeds, resulting in a drastic decrease in the customer's recorded disservice time.

Your Cloud Journey with Red Reply

Red Reply certified "Oracle Managed Services Provider (MSP)" has supported the customer in its Cloud Journey in all phases of design, from assessment and architectural consulting to implementation. Red Reply has ensured an agile and simple, yet structured and controlled, approach to the implementation of the solution, using the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) methodology, acquired and refined over several years of cloud project development experience, in combination with certified expertise on Oracle's highly specialised data world solutions.

As a Managed Cloud Services Provider, Red Reply implements and deploys a range of custom services designed to ensure reliability, resiliency, and wide availability, as well as high quality and performance. Red Reply's main goal is to ensure that key objectives such as monitoring, backup systems, disaster recovery, security and application lifecycle management are achieved, starting from the collection of requirements, through development, to operational.