Gazprombank has completed the migration of its automated banking system (ABS) — the "heart" of its IT infrastructure — to the Russian DBMS Postgres Pro Enterprise. As Maxim Klepikov, Deputy Head of the IT Infrastructure Department, stated in a corporate column, the core migration took about three hours and occurred without interrupting customer service. Preparation lasted 2.5 years.
The bank fundamentally rejected a hybrid architecture, where only significant objects of critical information infrastructure (ZOKII) are substituted, while the rest of the landscape remains on legacy foreign systems. Instead, the goal was complete import substitution.
According to Klepikov, purely business arguments also favored Postgres Pro Enterprise. One of them is the speed of backup and recovery: the domestic DBMS recovers in two hours, while Western counterparts participating in testing took fourteen hours.
The ABS migration took place in several stages: for more than six months, the software, along with the new DBMS, was tested at the partner's site, then within the bank's own environment with hundreds of operators simulating peak loads. After that, data was transferred in portions: first archival, then current, and finally, data that changes in real-time.
The direct switchover took three hours. Klepikov noted that the success of the migration was largely determined by the detailed development of an emergency plan, down to events with a 0.1% probability, and the team's cohesion. As a result, the bank received a fully import-substituted infrastructure with the potential for rapid product development.
