Embracing hybrid cloud for growth

Trinidad and Tobago is the southernmost link in the Caribbean Island chain, yet these islands are often at its center economically, politically and culturally. TTUTC’s mission is to create a people’s sector in the world of finance, to encourage and mobilize savings in the community while lifting the nation’s savings and investment consciousness, and to channel those resources towards stable and productive investments.

Trinidad and Tobago is the home of the Unit Trust Corporation. In 2015, TTUTC embarked on a journey of digital transformation, engaging Fujitsu to lead an application modernization and data cleansing initiative. This successfully enabled the bank to upgrade its legacy financial systems and provide accurate, de-duplicated records. That, in turn, provided the perfect foundation for the next step: migrating to a hybrid and multi-cloud architecture.

This ambitious project would enable the bank to move away from costly on-premise data centers with significant management overheads, to a more flexible, secure, and responsive environment. “We were number one in terms of understanding our customers’ needs,” explains Nicholas Narnton, CIO of TTUTC, “but when we looked at our capability to integrate new technologies and provide digital value to our customers, we felt there was significant room for improvement.”

Fujitsu won this project by proposing a solution built on Fujitsu’s Private Hosted Cloud, located in Fujitsu’s Tier III Data Center in Trinidad; Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer platform; and OCI for disaster recovery. This comprehensively supports TTUTC’s new financial application requirements, while providing a digital platform to facilitate future applications.

“We chose Fujitsu to develop our new digital platform,” Nigel Edwards, Executive Director, TTUTC adds. “We went out for a competitive tender. Of course, we tendered amongst some of the most competitive firms globally. The level of relationship, the level of professionalism that we had from Fujitsu made it an easy selection for us. We knew they had a high level of capability. We trusted the staff and the team members,”

The new landscape also provides TTUTC with a foundational digital platform for innovation - utilizing an ‘As-a-Service’ consumption model, which allows TTUTC to ‘Pay as you Go and Grow’. This is an important step in the implementation of a wider strategy for digital transformation across TTUTC’s business. Now, the bank can deploy innovative applications and services to improve customer experiences, drive organizational efficiency, productivity, and gain insights from a data driven business.

TTUTC now enjoys a high performance, high availability platform, engineered for production, testing, and disaster recovery workloads, hosted in Trinidad’s most secure Tier III data center. It is agile and scales seamlessly to support future services, with entirely predictable and affordable monthly costs. It is proactively supported by Fujitsu ISO 27001 certified cloud operations center and managed services.

At the same time, production data remains within the relevant borders, enabling compliance, while the hybrid approach means there is no potentially costly single point of failure, ensuring business continuity. Thus, TTUTC gets all the benefits of a robust, enterprise class cloud platform, delivered through a fully managed local engagement, based on business assurance, continuity, and value outcomes.