Business opportunity

Upon becoming a stand-alone company in 2021, wealth management company Colonial First State (CFS) needed to separate its core business systems from its parent entity. It went to market with a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a solution to complete this complex separation of systems, spanning applications, software, infrastructure and services.

Partnering with another leading IT consultancy firm, Kyndryl gained the scope to transition and migrate the Fund Management System (FMS) and related workloads to Kyndryl's managed data centre environment providing a Mainframe-as-a-service (MFaaS) solution.

Technical challenge

The primary goal for CFS was to have a seamless transition of mainframe service provider with minimal impact to its business operations and clients. The complexity of this request was inherent in the current environment being completely entwined with the parent company systems which needed to be completely separated.

The transition was also complex as it involved several third parties with a significant amount of interdependencies. Issues or delays would have an impact on the flow of activities in the integrated schedule.

The Kyndryl team supplemented critical technical skills in the areas of networking, certificate management, natural security, Resource Access Control Facility (RACF) and desktop configuration via Project Change Requests to complete solutions in readiness for the cutover.

Migrating a significant amount of critical data was in itself a challenge as the data was not clean and required significant attention to sanitise into Kyndryl’s standards for storage.

Our solution

Together, CFS and Kyndryl Consult implemented a solution that leveraged global service offerings and best practice process and procedures and resulted in the delivery of several key success factors:

• Approximately 35TiB of data was moved to the zCloud platform from the Proof-of-Concept, dress rehearsals and cutover with no data loss.
• The deployment of Kyndryl Cloud eXchange (KCX) network rapidly delivered a scalable platform, providing a managed, secure and high-performance Network to CFS.
• The delivery of three successful dress rehearsals and a go-live with zero incidents.
• The completion of a hyper care phase post cutover with minimal incidents raised during this period.
• Delivery of KCX and zCloud offerings, which are consumption-based, “pay for what you need now” solutions, that provide CFS with the ability to add or remove services when they need them and scalability to meet future requirements.
• A seamless transition to the users with the same look and feel as the pre-migration environment.

What progress looks like

• Removed approximately 900K orphaned entries through storage catalog sanitisation and cleanup; 50% of those during the cutover weekend itself.
• Unused software discovered from the data copy identified and removed.
• Delivered a flexible, cost-effective, secure and stable mainframe-as-a-service platform at scale.
• Accelerated the deployment of critical networking infrastructure from months to days via Kyndryl Cloud eXchange, including connectivity to AWS and Microsoft Azure.
• Initiated Kyndryl Bridge implementation; an AI-powered, open-integration digital business platform that helps identify inefficiencies with actionable insights for optimising IT resources.
• Successfully mitigated risk from the CrowdStrike outage which occurred during production migration.
• Built a framework for continuous improvement.