Trustt is a global digital banking solutions provider that helps banks, NBFCs, and FinTech’s deliver financial products quickly to their customers. Their cloud-based SaaS banking platform and GPT-based Conversational Suite provide automated digital journeys for customer convenience. Their clients include financial institutions of all sizes, and they boast a proven track record of success in improving efficiency, cost savings, and customer satisfaction.
As their operations expanded worldwide, Trustt realised they needed to modernise their database in order to provide the resilience, scalability and operational simplicity needed by their customers. They achieved this in partnership with YugabyteDB.
SMEhorizon speaks with Manoj Mathew, Chief Technical Architect at Trustt, on the modernisation of their legacy databases. Vish Phaneendra, Regional Vice President APJ at YugabyteDB also shares on the importance of modernisation in the face of a data driven future, and how SMEs can start.
The need for modern databases
While modernising infrastructure can often seem like a hurdle, businesses stand to lose more than sunk costs by putting this off. Phaneendra notes that “nearly every business strategy is driven by data and as it becomes an increasingly invaluable asset to decision-making, companies need to ensure that their database supports modern applications and business needs.”
“In a data-driven future where companies rely on massive volumes of data to generate insights on evolving market conditions and shifting consumer behaviours, delaying database modernisation could result in losses beyond sunk costs.
“For businesses in industry sectors such as retail and finance, where transactional consistency, scalability and guaranteed uptime even in situations of cloud failures and system upgrades are critical to the end-user experience, ensuring a modernised database architecture is important for business continuity.
“Putting off database modernization means that businesses could face challenges such as operational efficiencies, lowered productivity, delayed or in accurate decision-making, customer dissatisfaction and more in the long run.
“Moreover, legacy databases are more vulnerable to security threats due to outdated security protocols, operating systems and software. As ransomware attacks become increasingly sophisticated, delaying modernisation could expose the business to crippling and costly disruptions, including data breaches and reputational damage,” he concludes.
These arguments were recognised by Trustt. Recalling his company’s impetus for modernisation, Mathew recalls that it was to meet the priorities of his customers: resiliency, scalability and being able to offer operational simplicity. “Hence we decided to move from traditional relational databases to YugabyteDB as it offers cloud-native capabilities.”
Making the shift
Making the shift was relatively straightforward. Says Mathew, “We started our collaboration with the YugabyteDB team doing a Proof Of Concept for DDP and they converted our schemas into YugabyteDB format it helped to jump-start and do the development and testing. They also did various enablement sessions and it helped us to understand the YugabyteDB architecture, and Day 2 operations on the database.
“Other than understanding the schema and query tunning best practices to take advantage of the distributed SQL capabilities there were no other major challenges. “
This ease would come as a relief to companies who want to leverage the potential of better database management, but are daunted by the perceived barriers. Says Phaneendra, “More companies are turning to cloud-native applications because they provide the agility and cost-effectiveness that allow businesses to innovate at scale and stay competitive in the long run.
“Data has become a critical component for companies to scale their business as it provides vital information to generate insights for decision-making and improving customer experiences. As the volume of data that companies collect, manage, and analyse grows, businesses need to ensure that data is organized and stored in a structured and secure manner for easy access. This is crucial to ensuring business continuity and competitiveness.
“This is the impetus for companies to embark on their digital transformation journey. For these companies, flexibility, simplicity and performance are important factors influencing how they approach database management, and the speed at which they can transform.”
Reflecting on his company’s experience, Mathew advises other companies looking to modernise their infrastructure to look for a partner that can minimise disruptions and provide customisable solutions. “with the data layer supporting business-critical applications, it’s important that the process of modernizing legacy infrastructure goes as smoothly as possible without disruptions to service or productivity,” he says.
“Picking a reliable and trusted partner who can tailor solutions to your specific organizational needs is important to bringing peace of mind to SME leaders and their team whilst going through the modernization process.
“For us, it was important that our partner is able to support to deploy to any IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) option to deploy with VM Farm factor or containers like Docker/Kubernetes, allowing us to focus on other critical business solutions while modernization takes place in the background.”
To this advice, Phaneendra adds that “to achieve a cost-effective data migration process, SMEs with limited resources and expertise – and in fact, businesses of every size – should start by collaboratively building a roadmap of the process closely with their database management solutions provider. This is foundational to successful database modernization.
“SMEs can look into cost-effective turnkey solutions to simplify data migration from various relational sources. Importantly, these solutions offer flexibility and can be scaled up as a business’s data needs evolve along with business growth.“
