Ravi Jain, Chennai, Director – IBM Systems Hardware, India/ South Asia said:
“I don’t classify any banks as a legacy bank but I can say that if an application is using a traditional three-tier architecture approach, I will call that as a legacy architecture. When you have to move such an architecture to a cloud environment, it is like moving a monolith from one position to another,”
He said that when this happens, it does not provide the organizations with the true cloud advantage as that comes when one modernizes the underlying architecture.
He also mentions that the application readiness to be deployed in an agile fashion was the real hurdle that organizations were facing today.
With the Government of India announcing the amalgamation of 10 public sector banks into four megabanks, banks had to refresh their compute, storage and networking to address the increased transaction load and enhance the customer experience.
The most important success factor is assuring the functionality of the IT infrastructure, which directly affects the customer experience when we mention to bank mergers.
IBM is powering the IT infrastructure for all the PSU banks post the merger except for one of these banks. Four public sectors in which three public sector banks are already running their IT infrastructure on IBM Systems for the past 15 years.
Jain added some more statements to this statement:
“Merging core banking is the starting point. The core banking applications have to be merged for these two or three entities that are getting merged. We were playing a large role for most of the banks that were merging. I feel that this is the start of a journey because a consolidation of banks is going to give enough inflection points to the merged entity to look at the way they would want to deliver the services to their customers with the use of latest technology,”
He said that the challenges emerged as different banks were at different stages in their transition to cloud journey and because while it was possible that the merging entities may have the same core banking, they might have had different applications for other aspects like wealth management, payment applications and other omni-channel applications.
This is the time which he sees as the real inflection point for the banks to decide on the application consolidation, which he believes will be the next big play where companies like IBM can help clients realize their consolidation journeys.
Highlighting the importance of secure systems owing to the sensitive nature of the data involved, there are two aspects to it – 1. security
2. privacy
Jain said:
“The moment you start putting in mechanisms so the data remains secure, you need more computing power and performance on your systems so that it does not slow down the end user experience,”
“That doesn’t take care of the vulnerability of the system in itself. Our systems come up with various mechanisms or in-built technologies which help in identifying if a particular user is requesting access to data which is valid or not. Organizations can deploy policies that ensure data is not presented to people who are not meant to view it.”
“role-based access control “mentioned Jain, which is an inherent feature in IBM’s operating systems. He further went on to talk about ‘data privacy passport control,’ to ensure that data that travels is not susceptible to threats – either internal or external. Putting checks and systems in place to ensure this is the company’s constant endeavor, he said and ended the statement
