Why Fortune 50 Banks are Leaving Oracle for EDB Postgres

For major financial institutions, the prospect of database migration can be intimidating. After all, when you’re managing millions, billions, even trillions of dollars, improperly managed change can pose a risk to system stability and, worst-case, even lead to reputational harm.

While some in the finance space have decided to stick it out with legacy database providers like Oracle, despite restrictive licensing, growing costs and increasing inflexibility, industry leaders such as Fortune 50 banks have decided to move on. They have acknowledged that persisting with proprietary systems that cannot keep pace with their evolving needs, carries more risk than transitioning to a new, more flexible and dynamic database management system (DBMS). A better database, and database partner, that embodies their vision for the future is crucial for them to thrive.

As these major players within the banking industry look to the future, they’ve discerned what “better” means for them in order to satisfy increasing customer expectations and regulatory complexity. They need flexibility. They need security. They need support. They need a database that will protect their data, that will enable constant user access no matter the volume of traffic, no matter how unexpected the inevitable system failures are. Postgres database with its ongoing community-backed innovation is the perfect solution for these requirements.

That’s why Fortune 50 banks are leaving Oracle for Postgres, and partnering with the Postgres builders at EDB on their database modernization journey.

Top financial services institutions are future-proofing with Postgres

Across industries, legacy, proprietary databases such as Oracle are proving less and less popular than their open source counterparts. With limited integration options and, in some cases, deployment options that the legacy players offer, it becomes more difficult and costly for an enterprise to fully control and leverage their data, in turn making it harder to provide customers with the best, most modern service for their applications. Postgres, with support from an industry leader such as EDB, offers a solution to these challenges.

Preventing application impact when unexpected failures happen

The banking and finance industry is highly susceptible to unexpected downtime, which can result from external factors like natural disasters or internal issues like preventable security breaches and database errors. Issues can have a significant impact on a bank's reputation, financial stability, and regulatory compliance.

The easiest way to prevent these sorts of breakdowns is through a DBMS that can provide extreme high availability and the ability to integrate the necessary security and compliance tools to safeguard customer information. While legacy vendors like Oracle may offer potential solutions, major banks deserve the ability to look at alternatives and not to be restricted to a limited set of offerings.

Enabling planned downtime without application impact

Many organizations see planned downtime as an unavoidable necessity: For example, technology upgrades, mandatory security patching or just system hygiene tasks typically require application downtime. At EDB we believe it doesn’t have to be that way. It may be what your legacy provider tells you but that doesn’t make it true.

With Postgres, more specifically EDB Postgres and our EDB Postgres Distributed offering, maintenance work can be executed against the database without requiring application downtime or service degradation. The guarantee that, no matter what maintenance their tech stack requires, their database remains ‘Always On.’ is what makes EDB Postgres so valuable for Fortune 50 banks.

Removing complexity

When building modern applications for customers with ever rising expectations, dealing with inflexible architectures or restrictive licensing models can be a major issue. PostgreSQL is designed to suit the widest array of needs, across business types, workloads and industries. 

With EDB BigAnimal, our fully managed Postgres DBaaS in the cloud, Fortune 50 banks can experience the power of a fully managed Postgres database, taking the burden of exhausting and time consuming maintenance and administrative tasks off their shoulders. Fully managed Postgres means you can focus on building differentiating business capabilities, while EDB maintains your database environment. Not only that, but with EDB expert Postgres support you can have constant 24/7 access to the answers you need for the most complicated changes you might want to make. 

Accelerating modernization

Fortune 50 banks are constantly looking to modernize and digitally transform; to build truly modern applications that make banking easier across regions and around the globe. Unfortunately, with Oracle, that’s often not possible. It isn’t just a question of the limitations that legacy databases place on their users but the material price tags that come with any major growth initiative.

The more data you have, the more you pay. The more traffic you have, the more you pay. With more technology savvy users, there’s an expectation that banks deliver a suite of tools that provide information and perform transactions in milliseconds. Constant evolution is necessary. The more transformative and expansive your innovative initiatives are, the more you pay. The cost of legacy database solutions, including Oracle, can often clash with the need for financial services firms to maximize profitability.

Postgres, on the other hand, provides financial organizations with full control over the data and their future, without the large bill. By choosing Postgres, your modernization efforts can enhance your database and deliver value without incurring high costs.

 

Benefits of making the move to EDB Postgres

With EDB Postgres, major financial institutions and Fortune 50 banks have been able to achieve reliable performance and flexible deployment of new solutions, even in the face of high data volumes and ongoing upgrades to their systems and applications.

PostgreSQL on its own has proven to be transformational for many financial organizations, and EDB Postgres only amplifies that potential with benefits such as:
 

• Enterprise grade tooling: EDB has developed an ecosystem of tools around the database to help our users reliably, performantly, scalably and securely operate the world’s favorite open source database. Experiencing the advantages of PostgreSQL with mission-critical features and additional enterprise support has never been simpler than with the EDB Enterprise Plan
• Easy Oracle Migration:  Thanks to Oracle compatibility, Fortune 50 banks can migrate from Oracle to Postgres without sacrificing their existing architectures or seeing any drop in performance or availability and most importantly, significantly reducing the migration effort in the process.
• Extreme High Availability: Leading banks deserve the confidence and security of five 9’s of high availability, ensuring their applications don’t suffer service disruption during unplanned or planned database downtime. Thanks to EDB Postgres Distributed, Fortune 50 banks can have access to lightning fast disaster recovery tools and multi-master replication. Your database, nor your customers will never be in doubt again. 
• Postgres Anywhere: The cloud, public or private, is the future for major banking institutions, but databases like Oracle too often limit how and where banks can execute their cloud deployments. Here at EDB we no longer distinguish between public and private clouds. We focus on whether our customers want a self managed or fully managed implementation. EDB BigAnimal, is our multi-cloud friendly fully managed public cloud offering. For our self-managed offerings, with support for baremetal, hypervisor and kubernetes deployments in your datacenters or on IaaS in the major CSPs. We focus on the same Postgres everywhere and anywhere.

To meet the rising expectations of their customers for technical excellence, flexibility, agility, and control, Fortune 50 banks, as well as Fortune 500 companies across industries, are increasingly turning to EDB Postgres as their preferred database solution.

Is it your time to join them?

Want to learn more? Read our report “How Financial Organizations Overcome Business Hurdles by Employing Open Source,” here.