Cegeka Cloud allows financial institutions to upscale quickly and efficiently at peak times

On trading days, financial institutions have to process peak quantities of transactions at the opening and closing times. Cegeka Cloud allows you to acquire the necessary processing power at such times, immediately and automatically. 

Financial institutions have to deal with two peak moments on trading days: the first quarter hour after opening, and the last quarter hour before closing. At those moments, they encounter an enormous workload of transactions that have to be processed. Over the rest of the day, the number of transactions is much lower. 

This meant that our client, a financial institution, had to handle millions of financial transactions during those peak times. Because their systems were equipped to deal with the average workload rather than those peaks, it produced a lot of challenges: error messages, delays, and extra man-hours required to keep things running smoothly. 

Cost-efficient upscaling of hardware 

Dimensioning the hardware to handle these brief peak moments was a much too expensive solution. It would also mean that the machines only used a fraction of their processing power for most of the day. The ideal solution would be to upscale the hardware to peak performance only for that half hour. 

Cegeka already manages this financial institution’s hardware, and was therefore easily able to propose a solution as part of the continuous improvement of our service provision. That solution consists of the Cegeka Power Cloud, based on IBM technology. With this, you can rent the cores of IBM Power systems per minute. In this way, additional cores are activated on our client’s systems, automatically and immediately, when the workload exceeds the normal processing power at peak times. This means the number of delays and error messages is declining for our client. One result of this is that fewer personnel have to be deployed, and that these people can focus on their core tasks. 

Also in other sectors 

This solution for upscaling processing power is also interesting for other sectors. For example, bookkeeping agencies constantly encounter a peak when dealing with the month-end processing. It is more cost-efficient to upscale performance during this period than to provide the necessary processing power over the entire month. 

Other sectors with the same periodic peak times are e-commerce and the aviation industry. A solution like the Cegeka Power Cloud can also be used for unpredictable peak moments. In whatever circumstances extra bookings or transactions may suddenly occur, a pay-per-minute model for hardware is highly convenient. 

"In whatever circumstances extra bookings or transactions may suddenly occur, a pay-per-minute model for hardware is highly convenient."

Working in close cooperation, Cegeka is the first IBM partner in Belgium to acquire these IBM power machines, enabling us to offer a flexible model of core use. Thanks to our expertise and more than 30 years of experience in this field, we were able to give our client good, practical advice on how to get started. This meant that the implementation itself did not involve so much work, and went quite smoothly. 

We provided the financial institution with a full-management service for the IBM Power systems. Together with the client, we examined how many additional cores they required at peak moments. On this basis, we set the number of IBM Power system cores to upscale to the necessary level during the first and last quarter hours of the trading day This allows our client to maintain control of the costs. We manage the systems and are responsible for the infrastructure, giving our client complete peace of mind. 

The facility to hire cores by the minute with IBM Power is a relatively new technology, introduced by IBM in 2020. Our client was therefore originally cautious about getting onboard. However, Cegeka is a pioneer in this field in the Benelux. Persuaded by our expertise and the business case we made, our client resolutely opted for this innovative solution. 

"We manage the systems and are responsible for the infrastructure, giving our client complete peace of mind."

Sovereignty

The Cegeka Cloud data centres are located in Belgium and the Netherlands. As a result, the data storage and processing in our cloud complies with the local regulations, such as the European GDPR. An additional advantage is that the data is deduplicated across the two data centres. Also, the Cegeka management is Belgian, which is of some importance to local financial institutions. 

Furthermore, the Cegeka Cloud permits legacy systems such as mainframes to continue running in the cloud alongside other systems. That takes place in the same data centre and on the same network, which keeps the network delay low.