Fifteen major South African financial institutions have successfully migrated their sensitive business data and hosted systems to Teraco, in a single co-ordinated move has been described as a major technical feat.

The move involved 10 of South Africa’s small- to medium-sized banks and five other major financial institutions. Six of these institutions are within the top 15 banking institutions in the country.

All 15 institutions are customers of outsourced banking and payments service provider Direct Transact.

A total of 100 terabytes of sensitive data were migrated seamlessly and securely.

Dirk Labuschagne, executive head of business support services at Direct Transact, comments: “The new Direct Transact hybrid infrastructure at the Teraco facility allows for the best of both cloud and hosted servers to ensure minimal latency between hosts, full redundancy, maximum scalability and security.

“The move to Teraco was a delicate but important operation,” he adds. “Even a few seconds of downtime could have been very disruptive for the South African banking and payments ecosystem, but we pulled it off without a single hitch, in a move that is ultimately to the benefit of the entire financial ecosystem of the country.”

Direct Transact’s systems enable R40-billion worth of transaction flows through the local banking and payments system every month.

The move was the final phase of a project that had been in development for three years, protecting Direct Transact’s track record of 99,99% uptime for its clients over the past 20 years.

The 15 institutions, together making up 70% of South African banks that participate directly in the national payment system, previously had their core banking, processing, switching, card transaction and account verification data hosted by Direct Transact in a hybrid environment, in line with its clients’ specific needs.

Ryan Proksch, head of enterprise at Teraco, says: “We welcome Direct Transact to Teraco, the central point of interconnection between carriers, clouds, content and application service providers on the continent.

“By deploying critical infrastructure in Teraco, Direct Transact and its partners now have direct access to a financial ecosystem comprising more than 250 network and connectivity providers, all the local and global cloud onramps, and over 80 financial services providers.”

Labuschagne says the move to Teraco’s hyper-connected, highly resilient and secure colocation facilities is beneficial for the local banking ecosystem. “Teraco provides the ultimate protection against loadshedding, connectivity challenges, natural disasters, and it allows for vastly increased stability, availability and scalability of the system.

“Teraco houses the critical infrastructure of eight out of the world’s 10 biggest internet companies, as well as Africa’s largest internet peering exchange, NAPAfrica. It means our banking platforms will be able to handle accelerated growth by being scalable on all levels,” says Labuschagne. “This is good for the financial system’s growth and expansion potential, ultimately making our financial system more globally competitive and robust.”