The world’s one of the largest life insurance companies, serves over 1 billion customers, provides financial protection to the people through a mix of traditional and innovative products. Such as children’s education policies, individual and group life insurance policies, pension schemes, Shariah-based (Takaful) saving schemes, and accident and health products. All services are designed based on people of different levels of income, professions, and age groups.
Challenges
- In this legacy system, there was no proper unique identification for each customer. A common challenge was lack of proper documentation. Some of the stakeholders do not provide suitable paperwork for legacy system which creates a difficult situation to move data from old system to target system.
- Data incompatibility was another major issue in data migration. Because the target system used a separate database structure in addition to a different character encoding than the source system, which used another database structure.
- The low throughput ratio at data transfer due to geo latency location was different between source and target server.
- Data migration is a lengthy process, especially in the case of migrating a large amount of data. The migration time depends on the size of the data, number of source and target and the speed of network connection.
Solution
This is a whole system migration including database and application migration. In this project, data was required to move from one legacy system (IBM DB2 AS400, Excel and Flat file) to a new modernized system (Microsoft SQL Server).
There are over 300+ tables in the source system that contain more than 1 TB of data. All 300+ tables of the legacy system have been mapped and migrated to 60+ tables of the target system with 100% business logic.
- For Customer, we prepare unique client id for each customer based on new target system as in the new system they indicate the customer with unique id.
Since the previous data was disorganized, this resulted in significant time delays when attempting to access or display information from the system. After migration, it offers significantly faster performance, most cost-effective scaling while cloning snapshot backup and disaster recovery.
The solution also improves data security, accelerating time to time market data analysis, delivering innovative experience with seamless application integration.
- For documentation purposes, we frequently communicate with business stakeholders to resolve second challenge and they helped us to prepare a proper documentation.
- In legacy system, it holds only two kinds of data type – Character and Numeric. But in target system it holds all modern data types like date, integer, double, numeric, varchar, bit, Boolean and so many. We have used different types of transformation and conversion to transfer data from old to new system.
- To resolve throughput ratio, we introduced parallel pipeline engine, Pushdown optimization, Target database move to NO LOGGING mode, FLUSH BUFFER CACHE, allow BULK INSERT.
Impact
- Old system data was scattered & locked in the different systems, that’s why it was difficult to access all data over the place for decision making in a single view. After migration, all data are incorporated into a single system. Now businesspeople get data from one system. So that, they can gain a proper 360 view of their portfolio and take effective decisions for their portfolio.
- Legacy system data is messy. Through a proper data migration, we can clean, validate, remove duplicates and rearrange data which improves data quality.
- To get data from different manual sources and check all the data was time consuming. Data migration allowed them to get those data from a single storage which saves time, reduced cost.
