Situation
The largest cloud consumer platform within the bank’s Finance & Risk domain contained a significant amount of legacy code and outdated mechanisms. The platform was not making use of newly introduced Databricks and Unity Catalog best practices, resulting in a growing gap between the platform’s current state and market standards. The client engaged Valcon to help identify and close this gap.
Approach
An initial one-month proof of concept phase was sufficient to define the requirements and technical implementation details. This was followed by a six-month implementation phase during which improvement areas were identified and addressed. Valcon then handed over knowledge and identified improvement opportunities to the existing teams, while also planning and refining user stories for the next steps.
Results
Public cloud costs were reduced by 24% on a monthly basis, with further reductions expected as teams continue implementing the identified improvements. A cultural shift was facilitated towards embracing best practices and reducing technical debt. Technical data lineage was introduced to support compliance with BCBS239 standards by transforming a file-based way of working into Databricks Unity Catalog. Ten improvement areas were identified across storage strategy, data lineage, performance and code quality across the wider data platform.
