15 major South African financial institutions have successfully migrated all their sensitive business data and hosted systems to Teraco, Africa’s leader in data centre infrastructure. The migration was coordinated in a single move, described as a major technical feat and a step forward for the South African financial ecosystem.
A major data migration for the financial sector
The move involved 10 of South Africa’s small-to-medium-sized banks and five other major financial institutions. Six of these institutions are within the top 15 banking institutions in the country. All 15 institutions are customers of Direct Transact, South Africa’s largest outsourced banking and payments service provider.
A total of 100TB of sensitive data was migrated seamlessly and securely. “The new Direct Transact hybrid infrastructure at the state-of-the-art Teraco facility allows for the best of both cloud and hosted servers to ensure minimal latency between hosts, full redundancy, maximum scalability and security. The move to Teraco was a delicate but important operation – even a few seconds of downtime could have been very disruptive for the South African banking and payments ecosystem, but we pulled it off without a single hitch, in a move that is ultimately to the benefit of the entire financial ecosystem of the country,” says Dirk Labuschagne, Executive Head of Business Support Services at Direct Transact.
Direct Transact’s systems enable ZAR40-billion worth of transaction flows through the local banking and payments system every month. Its systems ensure that payment flows between different sectors of the banking and payments ecosystem work in harmony.
Dirk says he is extremely proud of his dedicated team for ensuring the migration took place with precision. “Our team members overcame all kinds of adversity to make this happen. We really have exceptionally skilled and dedicated people making sure that our clients and the broader financial system always remain safe and stable.”
It was, however, a matter of meticulous preparation. The move was the final phase of a project that had been in development for three years, protecting Direct Transact’s track record of 99.99% uptime for its clients over the past 20 years.
The 15 institutions, together making up 70% of South Africa’s banks that participate directly in the national payment system, previously had their core banking, processing, switching, card transaction and account verification data hosted by Direct Transact in a hybrid environment in line with its clients’ specific needs.
