A Top 10 Indian Bank Innovates Running on Tessell

‍The Company

The Tessell customer featured in this success story is one of India’s leading private sector banks. This Bank offers specialized services in five business verticals namely: Corporate Banking, Commercial Banking, Branch & Business Banking, Retail Assets, and Treasury & Financial Markets Operations. The bank currently serves over 14.31 million customers through a network of 528 branches and 408 ATMs.

The Challenge

One of India's top 10 banks wanted to move to a cloud-based managed service model for their databases.  However, the bank was unable to move forward because the proposed cloud database architecture did not support key production performance, operational, and business requirements:

1. Production Database Requirements:
   
   The bank had multiple challenges with application performance. Database query SLAs were not met due to data sets running as high as 17 TBs. Even with performance tuning indexes, database query response times, in many instances, are completed in over an hour, resulting in high turnaround times to obtain key decision data.
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2. No Unified Control Plane for Multi-Subscription Database Management:
   
   With more than 75 databases deployed in multiple AWS subscriptions, the visibility into the health of databases was fragmented, subsequently creating management silos. The inability to have a single pane of management increased the overall personnel cost and prolonged service availability resolution times. These indirect costs were hard to quantify and operational problems sapped both database adminstrator's and management's morale.
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3. Compliance Requirements & Regulatory Sign Off:
   
   Hardened OS Images and DB configurations are regulatory mandates along with Database Access Management (DAM), Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) agents, and specific auditing requirements.  Additionally, the Bank’s regulator mandated a move to enterprise versions of the most popular open source databases ( PostgreSQL, MySQL) due to their support of advanced security use cases.  As an end result, these hard requirements blocked the Bank from migrating to fully managed DBaaS in the cloud.
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4. Backup Strategy Limitations on Cloud Service Platforms (CSPs):
   
   Banks require a DB native backup stored over long periods of time. Backups performed by AWS-managed databases are essentially snapshots that are vendor-locked. These proprietary backups are specific to the cloud service provider and cannot serve use cases outside that cloud provider’s environment. Moreover, these backups if stored for the long term were a costly affair.
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5. Technical Debt:
   
   Some of the applications were running on end-of-life operating systems and database release versions. Migrating, upgrading, and certifying the application technology stacks to the latest version was a costly affair. Because of these limitations, the majority of the Bank’s databases were self-managed. Databases that the Bank migrated to managed environments like AWS RDS were being re-evaluated for movement back on-premises or into an alternative regulatory-compliant environment.

The Solution

This top 10 bank from India decided to evaluate Tessell’s database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform to simplify the deployment of databases on AWS, provide a single operational pane of glass, and support all of the bank's key regulatory requirements. As a fully managed multi-cloud database service, Tessell automates the Bank's data infrastructure, database lifecycle, and data management needs:

1. Databases as a Managed Service:
   
   Tessell is one of only a handful of vendors that provides fully managed, high-performance databases with enterprise-grade data protection, security, and compliance @ your terms.  When we say “@ your terms,” we mean the ability to bring your database technology stack: operating systems, databases, management, and security agents to achieve a unified management, security, and compliance posture across on-premises and the cloud.
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2. Tessell Availability Machine and Dataflix:
   
   The bank enjoys zero data loss protection and point-in-time recovery with Tessell’s Availability Machine, as well as supporting native backups for longer-term retention The native backups can be shared for utilization in case of compliance violations or locked away securely for long-term retention. These capabilities are central to Tessell’s no-lock-in approach, allowing the removal of Tessell without impacting the customer’s tenancy.
   
   Tessell’s Dataflix helped banks define and regulate data sharing across different users seamlessly leading to DB clones created within an hour compared to days earlier.
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3. Satisfying Compliance Requirements:
   
   Tessell provided 1-click integration of agents such as DAM and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) integrated with hardening of OS and Database images as required by the Bank. These “@ Your terms” capabilities provided the foundational architecture for the bank's regulatory compliance. For this customer, Tessell enabled over 250 point-hardened OS and database images ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. Additionally,  Tessell seamlessly migrated the databases to the latest OS patches over a weekend in contrast to the Bank’s 4-week estimate. Furthermore, Tessell supports enterprise editions of PostgreSQL and MySQL which are not currently available in RDS.

The Results

1. Full compliance with regulatory guidelines:
   
   The bank enjoys zero data loss protection and point-in-time recovery with Tessell’s Availability Machine, as well as supporting native backups for longer-term retention and compliance. The native backups can be shared for further storage or utilization in case of compliance violations or locked away securely for long-term retention. These capabilities are central to Tessell’s no-lock-in approach, allowing the removal of Tessell without impacting the customer’s tenancy.
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2. Cost Savings over RDS:
   
   The Bank was able to realize over 25% of cost savings, in contrast to alternative DBaaS choices, after migrating to Tessell. By adopting Tessell, the Bank enjoyed fully managed database services along with satisfying regulatory compliance requirements. Once in production, the Bank provided internal stakeholders with a self-service portal containing a cost-optimized set of database infrastructure shapes. Cloud spend was then further optimized by dehydrating idle shapes and re-hydrating them when developers returned to working with them. As non-production databases can represent 40% of the IT estate, these optimizations resulted in material IT cost reductions and bottom-line savings for the Bank.
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3. Query Optimization To Support Fast Query Response Times
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   Previously, the Bank’s MIS team performed nightly manual backups and full database clones, preserving indexes, in order to maintain query response times in the event of disaster recovery. As part of the POC, Tessell was not only able to cut query time on the MIS database by 8x compared to cloud-native deployments but also enabled the Bank to easily clone and index databases using one-click UI-based operations.  Additionally, the bank took advantage of on-demand cloning automation using Tessell’s REST APIs. Tessell’s Availability Machine enabled the bank to make sanitized and full database clones available to stakeholders across the organization using role-based access control.
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4. Automation & Scaling Operational Efficiency:
   
   Tessell’s AWS cloud service addressed all of the production copy data management The bank successfully achieved full compliance with enterprise support and received positive reports on Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools, patching, lifecycle automation and regulatory compliance requirements that blocked the Bank from utilizing the cloud fully Today, the Bank has migrated its Oracle, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL estate to Tessell on AWS. Staff reclaimed time to work on improving DB throughput by tuning and logical design.

The Tessell Platform positively impacted a number of stakeholders across the organization, including IT operations, DevOps, DBA teams, and the analytics team. In total, the resulting operational and cost savings enabled the bank to invest in strategic initiatives as the bank pursues its objective of becoming digital first without breaking the bank as they say.