Sandbox Strategies

The challenge of giving groups of programmers the resources and space to work on different software projects that all tie into the same core processing system could be likened to a busy restaurant kitchen, according to ING Direct's head of IT strategy Ben Issa.

"Imagine you have a number of chefs and they are bumping into each other. The ideal scenario is to give each chef his or her own kitchen," says Issa.

That may sound difficult to pull off, but ING Direct is attempting to bring that concept to life for its Australian unit in a project informally called "bank in a box." Using virtualization and replication technologies, the bank can create "copies" of the core system quickly and provide them to groups of developers in standalone sandboxes.

To do so, ING migrated its core banking applications to the x86 platform from mid-range servers running HP-UX. This hardware change helps the creation of images of the banking platform that can be patched or changed in isolation - producing a "sandbox" for IT development, testing and experimentation. "We have basically provided a mechanism that allows us to virtualize all of the bank's applications and infrastructure, so we can provision resources on demand," Issa says.

"We're able to be far more innovative than ever before because the shackles have been taken off," Issa says. "We can do tests that would have been disruptive before."

ING Direct's "bank in a box" was built using Cisco's USC for server processing; NetApp's FlexClone for a data storage array; Microsoft's Hyper-V as a hypervisor to work with existing development tools; and Dimension Data as a systems integrator to pull those tools together. All of this allows developers to make changes and test changes using a virtual version of ING Direct's entire system - vastly improving speed to market and allowing the institution to develop new products and make adjustments for trouble shooting and risk purposes.

Replication was always part of ING Direct's development process - what's been expanded is the pace of that replication. In less than a year, it's expanded its copies of the banking system from four to 395, tested new transactions and replicated the customers' environment for trouble shooting purposes. Issa says it now takes less than a day, when it would have taken 260 days to do a full replication before the bank in a box project. ING Direct did not comment by press time on expansion of the strategy to markets outside Australia.

"It was quite a lengthy process before, because you would have to provision the mainframe, database, networks, storage...all that comes with making a 'copy' of the bank," Issa says. "We can now eliminate a lot of that process."

The project is drawing the interest of a lot of banks, particularly larger institutions that are looking for fast and economical ways to modernize their legacy core systems so they can develop mobile banking apps and digital payments products, handle the expanded data management required by new compliance mandates and create sophisticated transaction-based marketing and loyalty programs.

The Need for a Modern Core

Although overall, banks are spending more on upgrades and modernization projects, the largest banks are still trying to avoid massive multi-year, nine-figure core overhauls, opting instead to incrementally modernize core systems to enable new digital delivery innovation and complex governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) initiatives.

"Clients want to interact with banks in a way that they haven't in the past. The game changer for banks is to offer personalized products via digital interactions," says Fiaz Sindhu, an executive with Accenture Core Banking Services.