RBL's strategy to move 40 apps to cloud in 40 days

Practising the transition and testing the process before the actual movement made RBL's project less complex and cumbersome.

RBL's strategy to move 40 apps to cloud in 40 daysMigrating to the cloud could be a complex process for an organisation unless planned and strategized well. Strategy for such projects should be framed keeping in mind the technical, operational and functional needs of the business. A successful strategy should address long-term goals like better alignment between IT and business and short-term gains like decreasing hosting costs.

In conversation with ETCIO, Sankarson Banerjee, CIO, RBL Bank talks about the banks' strategy to move 40 applications to cloud in 40 days.

"We did a lot of homework for about a year and a half before moving to cloud what was the process and what would be the benefits to the bank. We moved 40 production apps in 40 days. This was because of the extensive homework that we did for this project. We did not even tell the backed team that we were actually moving. We made sure that no one felt the difference," Banerjee said.

Banerjee's team made sure that they understood all the linkages. If an application is moving from on-premise to cloud, we must make sure that all the connections it has with everything else in the system are to be put in place well beforehand. Many people do this at the time of the movement which usually causes things to fail. Since RBL had placed these beforehand, the project was successful.

"We had put the linkages beforehand. If messaging has to flow from application A to some on-prem application B. When application A moves to the cloud, the same message has to flow. so the pipeline for the message to flow from cloud to on-premise, we tested well beforehand. So we made sure that when the application moves and starts sending messages, they flow seamlessly" he explained.

The bank used data migration tools from AWS, Cloud Endure and made sure that when the button was finally pressed, the transition went smoothly. Practising the transition and testing the process before the actual movement made RBL's project less complex and cumbersome.

"Cloud has given us flexibility. When we do allocation for on-prem, we don't just do that for today but we also have to look at tomorrow. We cannot buy new hardware or storage suddenly. It takes us 6-8 weeks to get a new storage after placing a purchase order. Sometimes placing a purchase order can take a month or two making the overall cycle for about 90 odd days. And we wanted to change this to cut and do our job in shorter time cycles, which is in minutes and hours. This is where the cloud comes in. And we decided to go ahead with AWS," he added.

Banerjee believes that this has allowed the company to handle peak loads and sudden spurts. Since the company did not have provision the same way it had to do on-prem, he feels the disaster recovery has become much more efficient.

"In an on-prem environment, as we increase the footprint, we also have to increase the security footprint, use more firewalls and allocate more people to manage those firewalls. This does not happen in the cloud because you are not paying separately for an increase in security footprint," Banerjee said.

RBL has managed to lower the cost of running with a lesser required skill set. Since there is no hardware to manage on the cloud, the bank did not hire the network expert or a special expert.

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