Wirecard Romania creates business synergies for merged entities with Oracle

Wirecard Romania consolidates IT systems with Oracle for better performance, improved security and compliance, and significant cost reductions.

Wirecard Group, a software and IT specialist in solutions for electronic payment transactions and the issuance of card and account products, entered the Romanian market in 2016 by acquiring three local companies: Provus Service Provider, a card solutions provider; Romcard, an ecommerce transaction provider; and Supercard Solutions & Services, a retail loyalty company.

Before the chain of mergers and acquisitions that led to the birth of Wirecard Romania, each of these companies owned and maintained their own IT systems: legacy HP and IBM servers, or Windows or Linux operating systems—but all used Oracle databases.

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Oracle Database Appliance enabled our three entities to quickly ramp up as a single business, improved the security of our IT environment, and empowered us to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. It also reduced costs from our legacy solution.

Valentin CostacheIT & Digital Director, Wirecard Romania SA

Business challenges

  • Standardize IT infrastructure to create business synergies between three formerly separate entities, ensure business continuity during the transition, and reduce operational costs for the new organization
  • Develop and maintain an environment that is fully compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and provides customers with the highest possible security during payment transaction processing
  • Stay on top of the rapidly changing field of payment security by completely protecting payment and loyalty card data and empowering partner merchants and banks to conduct business while making it safe from data breaches and identity theft
  • Establish a secondary site for long-term data storage to mitigate the risks associated with unplanned outages—such as lost revenue, decreased customer confidence, reputational damage, or penalties and fines

Oracle was the obvious choice for us as the merging entities all used Oracle Database. We selected Oracle Database Appliance for its short deployment time, affordable licensing model, and out-of-the-box security tools that are critical for anyone in financial services.

Valentin CostacheIT & Digital Director, Wirecard Romania SA

Results

  • Homogenized databases and platforms across the new organization by replacing legacy HP and IBM servers with Oracle Database Appliance High Availability with integrated software, compute, storage, and network resources as a solution in a box
  • Guaranteed the highest level of data protection for card issuers by ensuring that Wirecard’s IT environment is PCI DSS-compliant so that merchants meet all required levels of security when they store, process, and transmit cardholder data
  • Minimized the impact of potential user errors through automated backups that maintain the integrity of data and ensure quick restoring of payment services in the event of an interruption
  • Ensured robust protection for payment and loyalty cards by using Oracle Advanced Security together with hardware-based cryptographic engines integrated on processor chips to encrypt information using the transparent data encryption (TDE) functionality
  • Deployed a secondary Oracle Database Appliance in a remote location for quick disaster recovery of the critical IT systems and used Oracle Active Data Guard to synchronize the two sites, ensuring that bank transactions are authorized promptly across Romania
  • Experienced significant improvement for all batch-processing flows, reducing batch execution time by 75%, compared with the legacy HP and IBM platforms
  • Achieved significant cost reduction from legacy platforms by choosing an engineered system that is preconfigured for optimal usage, has built-in automation and best practices, and a unique capacity-on-demand software licensing model for its databases
  • Enabled Wirecard to deploy the solution quickly, meet compliance standards, and scale as needed
  • Worked with Oracle Premier Support for Systems to quickly resolve issues during installation and also to plan, test, and deploy patches as part of a regular security regimen

Partners

“We had an excellent working relationship with Logika. Actually, they are the ones who proposed Oracle Database Appliance and ran a few demos and stress tests for us. They have a team of very knowledgeable and experienced consultants and got us through the deployment quickly and easily,” Valentin Costache said.

“To meet Wirecard’s requirements for high availability, encryption, security, and consolidation, we thoroughly analyzed Oracle Database Appliance. It was an excellent decision, and the migration to ODA was a fast and straightforward project,” said George Ilinca, account manager at Logika IT Solutions SRL.
Published:May 16, 2018