Business case agility

This part describes the environment of an e-Agility solution.

In order to respect the confidentiality of our clients according to our PFS status, no client is mentioned here. Should you request further details, please click below.

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An international financial institution delivering the full range of fund services.

The company decides to develop its activities by expanding its network with new funds and creates a new office in Luxembourg, so that its clients are always in a position to access the best expertise at any given time.

The firm looks for a partner to host its mission-critical information systems. This partner should be able to evolve according to the firm’s business growth and control the costs in the framework of the 3-year-business plan.

The goals of this financial institution are expressed as such:

• Finding a partner able to
  
  • Design/deploy /manage the security shield protecting the application
  • Host all its IT infrastructures in a professional highly-resilient datacenter environment;
  • Operate all its IT systems in a structured way.
• Finding a partner which can evolve according to its business growth
• Establishing a strong relationship between the client, the hosting partner and the IT development team
• Controlling the costs in the framework of the initial 3-year-business plan.

Its main requirements are:

• Security:
  
  • One of the key factors to the success of the client was its commitment to the latest secure technology, providing its clients with a secure extranet system allowing them to consult assets, holdings, commissions and fund data
• Reliability:
  
  • The PFS status proves that ebrc is a trustworthy and suitable partner
• Speed:
  
  • The institution is planning to start business in the 4 upcoming months, therefore, ebrc has to commit itself to operate an up-and-running platform in a 3–month-time.
• Technical expertise:
  
  • The financial institution’s IT systems need experts to drive and support modern applications and infrastructures. The real objective is to delegate the full set of operation duties, from the network up to the operating systems, including security, hardware, databases, backup, upgrades, plus fast intervention in case of trouble, in close collaboration with the remote development team.
• Monitoring 24/7/365
  
  • Monitoring on a 24/7/365 basis is necessary to have control over the performance and availability of the business value chain.

ebrc was successful thanks to its global approach, which might be synthesised as follows:

Enabling efficient, right-sized, “out of the box” Business Resilience …

By focusing on the following main values:

• Being driven by actual business continuity needs; staying technology-neutral
• Promoting proactive resilience approaches
• Supporting detailed incremental services
• Relying on co-operation concept and tools
• Blending vision with control

Following a strong business growth, the platform, initially deployed on a single site, has since been duplicated on a second distant site in the aim of increasing its resilience and also further supporting the Office Automation applications. In between, ebrc conducted a Risk Assessment and a Business Impact Analysis to define the scope of the Business Continuity solution and reach the resilience objectives of its client.

Therefore, the platform is now configured as follows:

• Foundations: Business Impact Analysis and Risk Assessment
• ITIL service methodology
• Infrastructure: Redundant deployment on two distant sites in hot standby
• Continuity strategy:
  
  • Recovery Time Objective: 4h
  • Recovery Point Objective: 24h
  • Archival retention points. Last week, quarter end, year end
  • High bandwidth, full meshed telco
  • High availability configuration with continuous control
• Recovery area (work seats) and Business Continuity Plan
• Continuous data resilience
• Test and control the resilience indicators.
  
  

The current deliverables of this project can be summarised as follows:

• Delivered by the client and the application editor
  • Application support and developments
  • Requests for Change
  • Global Application Management, including helpdesk for end-users
• Delivered by ebrc
  
  • Communication
  • Management of IT room and security
  • Management of security components
  • Platform monitoring and alerting (LINUX, MySQL)
  • Platform co-management (reactive and proactive)
  • Cooperation cockpit and reporting
  • Data backup and archival
  • Service Account Management (Reviews)
    
    

The true value of the solution results from the close cooperation of three partners fully committed to reach common objectives and success:

• ebrc’s client that keeps developing its skills and tools, fruitfully joining fund distributors and fund promoters;
• Its Software Development partner which may improve its software package and add new features without the burden of the day-to-day maintenance; 
• ebrc which extends its specialisation in the operational management of secure IT platforms.

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