CASE STUDY
From Nine Silos to One System: Rebuilding a Mission Critical Financial Platform
INTRODUCTION
When our team joined this engagement in late 2021, a mission critical financial system was running on nine separate islands of aging infrastructure. Each site had its own Oracle 12c database and its own Oracle Forms stack. No clustering. No shared resources. Downtime and compliance gaps were rising fast.
The Challenge
- Consolidate nine standalone environments into a resilient, modern platform.
- Keep day to day billing and accounting operations online throughout the transition.
- Meet new security patching and version compliance mandates.
Work We Did
Agile Leadership
- Adopted sprint planning and Jira tracking to manage backlog and technical road map.
- Stepped into architecture lead responsibilities as project evolved, demonstrating M&S “lead with action” ethos.
Ongoing Modernization
- Integrated a new enterprise timekeeping feed via biweekly file ingest and validation.
- Leading metadata standardization to align with governmentwide financial reporting mandates.
Lift and Shift with Tech Refresh
- Migrated nine Oracle 12c instances into a single two node Oracle 19c RAC cluster with pluggable databases for each site.
- Consolidated nine Forms and Reports deployments into one shared stack while preserving site specific UI.
Zero Disruption Execution
- Orchestrated cutovers during maintenance windows; users experienced no unplanned downtime.
The Solutions
- Single Oracle RAC cluster delivers redundancy, scalability, and simplified patch management
- Unified application layer reduces maintenance overhead and eliminates version drift
- Automated time entry integration ensures data accuracy across sites
- Metadata standardization positions system for future analytics and compliance needs
the results
Stability Restored
Uptime improved and support tickets fell as clustered architecture absorbed hardware failures.
Security Up to Date
Regular patching is now feasible across one platform instead of nine.
Lean Team, Big Win
A core team of three delivered the entire migration and continues to drive enhancements.
Conclusion
Modernizing legacy systems does not require massive teams or prolonged outages. With the right expertise and agile mindset, you can lift, shift, and enhance in parallel. If your mission critical platform is stuck in siloed infrastructure, M&S Consulting can help you move fast without dropping the ball.