- New consumer protection laws
- Digital transformation and cloud mandates
- Legacy database unable to deliver on new DR, HA, and reliability requirements
- Inflexible database vendor licensing model
- High maintenance and licensing costs
The third largest pension fund in Brazil, with R$66 billion in assets and 135,000 participants, the Fundação dos Economiários Federais (FUNCEF) is a social security provider for CAIXA Bank.
Its values include transparency, ethics, participatory management, equity, professionalism, commitment, and sustainability.
The focus of FUNCEF is guaranteeing its participants and beneficiaries the payment of their benefits. For this, it invests its resources judiciously, in several areas, such as fixed income, variable income, structured investments, real estate and operations with participants. These investments ensure that the benefits of its participants are paid in accordance with FUNCEF policies.
FUNCEF has two major challenges. A new Brazilian Law called the General Data Protection Law means that FUNCEF must adjust its data protection and security policies to avoid future leaks of data or personal data exposure. In addition, its number one priority is digital transformation—supporting its beneficiaries via digital processes and experiences—and its IT team has been charged with making it happen with a constrained budget.
More specifically, FUNCEF needed to reduce database costs to free up budget for addressing the compliance and digital transformation challenges. The goal was to move to the cloud, but that was problematic due to a lack of licensing options from their legacy database vendor.
FUNCEF systems need to run 24x7 with very high availability (HA). Every environment must be replicated and set up in HA mode with a hot disaster recovery (DR) site with the same SLAs as the production environment. However, the vendor’s inflexible licensing model created a difficult situation for FUNCEF, along with high costs.