Managing Unprecedented Workloads in 2020’s Market Volatility

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Managing Unprecedented Workloads in 2020’s Market Volatility.

2020 was a challenging year for all of us, for many differing reasons, but it was certainly not a year of standing still for most organisations, in fact many businesses saw previous trends accelerate in 2020. In a recent study McKinsey found “responses to COVID-19 have speeded the adoption of digital technologies by several years—and that many of these changes could be here for the long haul.” IT leaders confirmed “companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years.”

In the financial sector coping with market volatility in 2020, in an increasingly democratised and competitive market, was a huge driver of transformation.  Ensuring technology could continue to deliver secure, scalable and agile environments, in a cost-efficient way, was an imperative for many organisations.

FNZ are a global FinTech with £308B of assets under management, their mission is to help people reach their financial goals. FNZ must constantly help their investors reduce cost and complexity, whilst delivering a seamless service, with more personalised solutions. To keep pace in this fast-moving market FNZ need to deliver software at a high rate, to be more successful. This means launching new products and features in hours, not weeks, which requires more automation.

It was essential for FNZ to protect the technology investments made to date in their business applications, whilst ensuring a future pathway to continue the modernisation of applications and infrastructure. FNZ needed open systems and agile platforms, plus the ability to shift from on premise to a hybrid cloud environment, shifting from Capex to Opex, and doing all this whilst maintaining regulatory compliance.

Working with IBM business partner CSI Group, FNZ now have two key environments, supporting their core strategy. The CSI PowerCloud platform, for core production workloads, provides a flexible, scalable and secure platform, with fast connection to a virtualised environment. Plus, Test as a Service environment for development, running on IBM Power Virtual Server, with RedHat for open standards and IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management for consistent visibility, governance and automation, providing a fully automated solution. Easy to provision temporary environments, testing environments can be set up and torn down quickly, allowing a much more agile approach to the delivery of solutions in the Power environment.

The outcomes the solution has delivered are impressive. CSI PowerCloud has delivered an unprecedented volume of transactions in 2020, allowing FNZ to continue trading and cope with spikes in demand. FNZ have seen a 25% reduction in cost of running production workloads in CSI PowerCloud, compared with on premise systems with in-house support. The automated Test as a Service environment is at least 15 times faster compared to carrying out the same task manually and can be delivered through Power Virtual Server for as little as £100 per day. FNZ have a replicable secure hybrid cloud platform supporting accelerated business growth.

Join us at THINK 2021, on 12th May, to learn more about how FNZ, and many other organisations, are navigating change through transformation, automation and modernisation. Register Now.