YES Bank migrates all its core systems simultaneously in 48 hours

The project involved a huge team size of 150 people from across application and solutions team, IT Infrastructure team, business teams and partners working over 90 days with precision to achieve this ambitious goal
At the beginning of financial year 2010-11, YES Bank embarked on a journey into the next phase of growth and launched YES BANK-VERSION 2.0, which is a vision of establishing 750 branches, 3000 ATMs, 12,000 employees, Rs 125,000 Cr. Deposit base, Rs 100,000 Cr. Loan book and a Rs 150,000 Cr. balance sheet size by 2015. As the bank had crossed the half way mark of version 2.0, and with YBL’s continued focus on sustaining rapid growth targets and increasing customer acquisition, it became imperative that the bank’s core systems, were scalable and had a high degree of performance, stability and availability.

The Challenge

YES Bank faced the challenge of upgrading its core banking systems in just three months. This was easier said than done, because everything had to be done while providing high degree of stability, scalability, performance and availability and address technology obsolescence issues.

The Implementation

This project involved a two step process over 3 months which were executed in conjunction:

1. Data center revamp: Upgrading hardware and network setup to the latest technologies
2. Core banking and net banking platform upgrade

This project involved a huge team size of 150 people across Application and Solutions team, IT Infrastructure team, business teams and partners working over 90 days with precision and in a harmonious synchronized way to the detailed laid out plan.

1.  To achieve this, the bank had frozen the Deployment of all Enhancements/Fixes in the existing Production system by Dec 31, 2012 to facilitate seamless Functional/Performance testing of the new environment.

2. Moreover, the pre-production servers were made available for testing by Dec 19, 2012. As part of the process, Operations and Service Delivery (OSD) team performed application testing on this new platform.

3. There were discussions arranged with respective stakeholders to decide on the testing schedule and resource requirements. The testing and sign-off needs was completed by January 9, 2013.

4. The team had worked out the detailed migration  and cut-over plan where in there was a downtime  of 26 hours starting from January 25, 2013 till January 26, 2013.

5. The start and end time of this activity was dependent on timely hand-over of Core Banking System by all branches on January 25, which incidentally was a holiday.

6. The entire activity had been planned with great precision and no efforts had been spared to carry out multiple activities in parallel in order to optimize/minimize the downtime and consequently the business impact.

The Success

This is the first milestone to provide a stable and scalable platform to achieve the bank’s version 2.0 business targets. The core systems were migrated simultaneously over a 48 hour period. The project encompassed upgrading the platform for core banking suite of applications (FCR/FCC/Flex@R/Flex@C/Flex@RTGS). As part of this upgrade, they migrated all systems from Windows 2003/Windows 2000 to Windows 2008 and also upgraded the database from Oracle 9i to Oracle 11g, including other environmental software upgrades bringing in better performance and latest high availability technologies like Oracle RAC.