Here at FlashGrid, we’re proud to be enabling the digital transformation of many large corporations across the globe. By allowing them to move their Oracle RAC clusters from on-premises to the cloud, they have accelerated their product development and accessed a whole new suite of tools and tech.
We were recently flattered by Mark Wang, S&P Global Ratings’ head of cloud engineering, when he credited us in an interview with Protocol:
“We moved 100% to the cloud, [but] we were actually on Oracle Exadata. And we use a technology called FlashGrid to replicate the performance in the cloud. So now our Oracle is running on [AWS’s] EC2 FlashGrid.”
Mark Wang – Head of Cloud Engineering for S&P Global. Source: Protocol.com
S&P is a great example of a company with a strong heritage (160+ years) that become as nimble as a modern fintech. Their goal was to increase the speed at which they create new software and allow coders to work unincumbered by where their code runs.
Mark Wang had a tight three-year deadline in which to reboot S&P Global Ratings’ approach to cloud computing. In the first year, their goal was to increase system stability whilst migrating everything to the cloud. In the second year, they focused on bringing new products to market. And this third year is all about innovating and exploring new technologies.
S&P has moved 100s of applications to the cloud by building their cloud expertise in-house. They didn’t hire a whole new team externally; they admirably invested in upskilling their existing workforce.
The next part of S&P’s data strategy involves further breaking it down into purpose-built data stores. “This way, we have the full CI/CD experience before microservices,” Mark says. Then, independent development teams can take complete ownership of the full stack; shipping and testing products, without depending on anyone.
Mark chose to mitigate risk by adopting multiple cloud providers. This has also allowed S&P to explore new technologies; for example, they’re investigating how AI and machine learning can reduce friction in their processes, automate testing and unlock new insights from such things as monitoring alerts. And they’re trialling blockchain to increase the security of their assets.
The Finance industry has seen an acceleration in the adoption of cloud services, partly driven by remote working during COVID, but also from seeing other companies in the industry race ahead of the pack. We know first-hand how demanding the workloads and technological requirements can be from our clients in finance and banking.
If you would like to learn more about how FlashGrid can help you with your Oracle databases, contact us.
