The Summary
We was engaged by an International Financial Services institution to take a review of its Data Centre installations with a view of consolidation and cost savings. We undertook a review of its 12 Data Centres in 6 countries to include the IT infrastructure, applications, and business data.
Aligning the technology implementations with the need to maintain jurisdiction compliance required the team to review and validate the client’s IT Services and Applications Catalogue for the region.
We presented its findings and recommendations with a proposed saving of USD20million across a five-year project.
Introduction
Our client is one of the Europe’s largest financial services companies and headquartered in Paris, with presence in 66 countries across the globe serving more than 31 million customers. With Regional Headquarters located in Hong Kong, the PTS team assisted the client to assess its current Data Centre, IT and Applications. Crucial to the assessment was maintaining compliance to local financial regulations as well ensuring that the local business was not impacted by latency issues as services were offshored.
We was informed later that the team implemented the Strategy and recognised further savings as a result of the consolidation process.
The Challenge
Our client was considering a regional consolidation of its IT Services across its offices within the Asia Pacific region.
We was initially appointed to develop a high-level Digital Transformation Strategy which was endorsed by the Regional Senior Management. We was subsequently retained to continue with the development of a detailed Transformation Business Case that focused on consolidating the existing IT Services hosted within the in-country Data Centres that included Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, into two new APAC regional hubs, one located in each of Hong Kong and Singapore.
The Financial Institution had 12 Data Centres across the region – all were outsourced to third party Data Centre Service Providers. With much of the current Technology platforms coming to end of life, there was a window of opportunity to align the future Technology Refresh purchases with a consolidation of systems and services under a new regional architecture that aligned with the client’s global IT Strategy of transitioning future services to utility based IT infrastructure services within a Regional Data Centre.
The Solution
We undertook a detailed engagement across the six country locations covering the current and future Applications, IT services, and Data Centre facilities to provide a comprehensive assessment of the transformation opportunity with budgets and cost savings over the five-year transformation and transition period.
Through analysis across the region, savings were identified to be made through delivering a single consolidated storage platform and through effective replication across the two Regional Data Centres, reduce the risk of loss of data and improve the effectiveness of a recovery solution for all the client’s systems.
The Benefits
Our comprehensive understanding of the APAC Data Centre, Network, and Cloud services marketplace, and regulatory requirements across all the countries enabled the project team to develop a compelling Business Case.
We assessed the current and future costs for the Data Centre transformations with a reduced facility footprint to represent comparable market costs across a 5 year operational period.
The outcome, we presented to and was endorsed by the client’s Global Management team, the findings and recommendations for a transformation and transition to a robust APAC Regional Private Cloud platform located within the two regional Data Centre facilities each capable of taking the full regional IT load. IT services required to remain within country due to regulatory or latency requirements would be located within Micro Data Centres with the redundant platforms located within the Regional Data Centres.
The client was able to take steps to standardise its hardware and Data Centre footprint that resulted in significant savings to ongoing costs of delivering IT services across the region.
“PTS Consulting provided us with deep expertise regarding our IT facilities, operating experience in our Asia Pacific markets, and highly responsive support.”
CTO – Asia Pacific
