PKO Faktoring and the first cloud migration of a bank factor
Deployment date: 2023
Sector: finance
Microsoft Azure
Given its rapid business growth and existing technical debt, PKO Faktoring decided to migrate entirely to the cloud in view of using the new environment to build and develop more advanced technology solutions. The OChK team prepared an action plan that involved setting up infrastructure from scratch in the Microsoft Azure public cloud based on Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The project implementation resulted in increased service performance, process automation, reduced time-to-delivery, enhanced security, as well as development of cloud competencies in the PKO Faktoring team, which are necessary to gain and maintain the company’s competitive advantage.
About PKO Faktoring
PKO Faktoring is a company of PKO Bank Polski Group and operates on the market since 2009. The range of services offered to businesses covers invoice financing – a quick and easy way to receive cash against outstanding invoices, regular domestic and international factoring – including non-recourse factoring with a shift of the customer insolvency risk, Open Items List factoring – for clients cooperating with large numbers of customers, as well as reverse factoring – supplier financing scheme designed to finance procurement. The company’s team includes nearly 150 experts who have already helped nearly 2,700 clients leveraging their experience.
Challenges
Technical debt. In the past year (prior to the project launch), the assets and number of clients served by PKO Faktoring increased by 50 and 20 percent, respectively. The need to keep up with rapid business growth while using the existing infrastructure has uncovered the necessity of a significant upgrade.
Complex IT infrastructure management process. Being part of the PKO Bank Polski Group, having numerous business ties with other group entities, and emerging changes in the way factoring services are managed within the group led to increased complexity of the IT infrastructure and significantly extended the process of implementing new IT solutions to the business (time-to-market).
Understaffing. Insufficient number of IT department professionals caused limitations in planning new projects and led to their subsequent slow or even impossible implementation.
Pressure to optimize and automate processes. In order to gain a competitive edge and respond to the needs of their clients, PKO Faktoring needed to focus on streamlining existing processes, which would eventually contribute to faster turnaround times and higher quality of services.
Upon analysis and consultation with the OChK team, PKO Faktoring decided to migrate its entire IT infrastructure to a cloud environment. The company chose the Microsoft Azure platform because of the existing technology stack and the possibility to use already purchased MS product licenses. The company was particularly intent on:
maintaining systems availability for employees and clients during migration
meeting security requirements (PKO Faktoring is part of the PKO Bank Polski Group, a regulated entity subject to the requirements of the Cloud Communication by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority) and other sector regulations
building cloud competencies of its team and developing their ability to adopt a completely different approach to the delivery of IT business solutions in the cloud
Solution and implementation
Originally, the project was to be implemented using the lift-and-shift process. However, due to the existing technical debt and lack of complete knowledge of specific infrastructure components, the direction was changed to building cloud infrastructure from scratch using the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach.
The first stage of the project involved building an enterprise-class landing zone compliant with extensive security requirements of the PKO Bank Polski Group and ready to launch in its environment the SOC as a Service provided by the OChK team.
As part of SOC as a Service, the OChK team has launched 24/7 monitoring of PKO Faktoring’s resources for security incidents in the environment. With this service, in the event of an incident being detected, both teams are prepared to work together to minimize its potential impact.
At the same time, OChK experts reviewed network communications between servers, and then developed precisely defined network rules for each of them. An important change in this area was reduction of network traffic to the necessary minimum, which significantly reduced the risk of potentially dangerous incidents.
The next step was to set up cloud servers and install individual services on them. The OChK and PKO Factoring teams jointly planned the migration, analyzing each stage of the migration to ensure the continuity of the company's operations and maintain the quality of IT services.
The project combined Agile and DevOps methodologies and used Azure DevOps tools, resulting in smooth project management, high responsiveness to evolutionary changes and efficient communication.
Technologies used
In order to carry out the project, the public Microsoft Azure cloud was used, within which the following services were activated:
Azure Virtual Machine
Azure Backup
Azure Policy
Azure Load Balancer
Azure Virtual Network Gateway
Azure Application Gateway
Azure Firewall
Azure Virtual Desktop
Tools that were used to configure and manage the cloud:
Azure DevOps
Terraform / Terragrunt
PowerShell
Results
Some individual systems were updated during migration to the cloud in order not to carry the existing technical debt over to the newly built environment. This made it possible to install more advanced security systems, and thus meet one of PKO Faktoring’s priorities.
The migration process involved standardization of the operating system versions used, which greatly accelerated the process of implementing new services.
Thanks to the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, the company can now easily scale up its infrastructure and automate processes to ensure speed, reliability and high performance of its services.
Building cloud competencies in the PKO Faktoring team and reducing the range of infrastructure management tasks has freed up resources and time to build the company’s business value and develop innovative solutions.
Moving to the cloud was a lot of work, but was also very satisfying. Thanks to collaborating with OChK, we were able to complete the migration by learning the Azure cloud in the blink of an eye. But it's not over yet. Our adventure has just begun, and building real cloud solutions, we can say, is just getting started.
Darek Kazimierski
Director of Technological Innovation Department at PKO Faktoring