HDFC Life accelerates business reporting by 48% with Oracle Exadata Database

With a large enterprise data warehouse that manages sales, operations, and financial reporting, HDFC Life was experiencing delays in Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes that could not  prepare data models at an optimum speed.

Also, user satisfaction was declining as ETL jobs were taking a long time to finish, which was impacting the daily decision-making process. HDFC Life decided to move from its on-premises infrastructure to a high-performance cloud solution.

HDFC Life performed a detailed assessment of various options in the market and ultimately decided to migrate its Exadata data warehouse to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

A pilot project showed that HDFC Life would benefit from faster runtime of upstream and downstream applications, lower total cost of ownership across all lines of business, better user experience by eliminating unplanned maintenance or outages, on-demand scalability, and enterprise-class business continuity.

Using Oracle Exadata Database Service in OCI, HDFC Life gained a 48% improvement across all financial reporting, allowing business users to perform faster queries on the corporate data warehouse. Priority overnight processing jobs were finished 40% earlier than previously, giving data analysts more agility to make decisions.

Also, Exadata’s speed of processing and maximum availability shortened ETL job runs by up to 6 hours, providing analysts with access to critical data at the very start of the working day. This helped boost employee satisfaction and business efficiency. CMT processes are now completed by 7 a.m. and Tline datasets used for management reporting are now available 57% earlier than they were on-premises.

With Oracle Data Integrator running on an OCI VM, all divisions across HDFC Life have fast access to analytical data through QlikView, which provides insight into downstream management reporting, as well as financial sales and investment reporting.

Backup time dropped by 66% to 8 hours after migrating the on-premises RMAN backup to Oracle Exadata Database Service’s built-in Oracle Cloud Object Storage facilities, with weekly full backups and daily incremental backups.

Since the migration, the company has not had to raise a single maintenance ticket, thanks to the extreme performance and automated patching and updating of Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI.

With its quarter-rack configuration of database servers and storage servers, HDFC Life has the flexibility through Exadata compression technologies of using up to 149 terabytes of data storage, giving it peace of mind to grow steadily from the current capacity of 32 terabytes.

The insurer’s InfoSec team has also proposed adopting the Oracle Cloud availability domain in an alternate city for protecting its data through a scalable, cost-effective resiliency and disaster recovery solution.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the initial system integrator of HDFC Life’s Exadata X3 data warehouse on-premises, carried out the migration to OCI. Also an Oracle Partner, TCS recently was ranked a leader in Oracle Cloud services in the Everest Group’s Peak matrix.