Fifteen major South African financial institutions have successfully migrated all their sensitive business data and hosted systems to Teraco, one of Africa’s leaders in data centre infrastructure. The migration was coordinated in a single move described as a major technical feat and a step forward for the SA financial ecosystem.
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 100 terabytes 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,” said Dirk Labuschagne, Executive Head of Business Support Services at Direct Transact. “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.”
Direct Transact’s systems enable R40-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.
