Introduction
Lloyds Bank plc is a British retail and commercial bank with branches across England and Wales. It has traditionally been considered one of the “Big Four” clearing banks. Lloyds Bank is the largest retail bank in Britain, and has an extensive network of branches and ATMs in England and Wales.
IBM entered into a 10-year (£1.3bn) contract with Lloyd’s Banking Group (LBG) to provide both Off-premise
and On-premise Private Cloud solutions, to support the migration of ca. 2,000 of the bank’s 3,200 applications over a three-year period.
Both solutions were deployed at 2 Data Centres each, for resilience. IBM leveraged their partner Technimove for Infrastructure testing to ensure the systems are robust, and to identify and mitigate points of failure pre-migration.
Key Challenges & Risks
The environment comprised the Live On-Premise Cloud, Pre-Live (i.e. RTL –Route To-Live) On-Premise Cloud, and both Pre-Live and Live Bare Metal environments, which made testing challenging. Large number of applications and related components added to the complexity
The Solution
Technimove began analysing the design and build documentation to extract the testable features and conduct a Gap Analysis.
Based on the the GAP analysis we crafted a test plan and design to execute in phases covering hardware, platform and network components.
The team defined the Scope and Approach, all MTPs (Master Test Plans) & DTPs (Detailed Test Plans, including Test Scripts), Test and Resource Scheduling, Defect Triage and escalation, TCRs.
We utilised a project management approach and split the test process into phases to ensure maximum coverage while ensuring minimal disruption.
The scope of our testing services was to check for:
- Hardware issues such as device configuration and resilience.
- Logical issues such as device and network failover points.
- Network services issues such as DNS, DHCP, Backup/Recovery, Patching/Deployment, Alerting & Monitoring, Storage Management.
- Business applications resilience. data and workload can be tested
- Operational issues such as meeting SLA’s/OLA’s for Backup/Recovery (RTO/RPO), Performance, Stress, and DR, possibly BC
The Result
- Testing culminated with operational testing, primarily based on contractual SLAs/OLAs.
- Test completion reports approved by the banks SME’s were utilised and test-related Change Requests were handed over for sign off.
- Clear and concise test documentation (scope, approach, test plans, and test scripts) helped the client to improve their infrastructure and reduce fail points and future failures.