The foundation of modern banking success begins with today’s technology and architecture decisions. Customer demographics, demands, and shifting technology paradigms can decide the shape of modern banking. Digital natives and early adopters demand banking integrated into their lives through seamless connected actions, advice, and support that’s personalized to them and based on their life moments.

“We’re in the business of unlocking the art of the possible for our customers,” says James Ronneberg, principal product manager of interconnect at Oracle. “Interconnect helps bring what was previously unimaginable to life.”

This blog covers how financial vertical customers using Oracle Financial services can run a split architecture deployment in a multicloud solution. Where application and middleware stack run in Azure Cloud and the Oracle Database stack runs in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Solution overview

Oracle Financial Crime and Compliance Management (Oracle FCCM) is a comprehensive suite of applications that help financial institutions fight money laundering and other financial crimes, while achieving compliance with related regulations. It supports the complete spectrum of anti-financial crime use cases, from customer due diligence to transaction monitoring, to investigations, to regulatory reporting and management insights.

Deploying Oracle FCCM applications on multicloud platforms, and realize the following business benefits:

  • Move your infrastructure to the cloud with minimal change to your application architecture.

  • Lower the total cost of ownership by reducing overprovisioning and moving from fixed to variable costs.

  • Reduce the risk of interruptions to business operations and increase your responsiveness and customer satisfaction.

The Oracle and Microsoft Interconnect partnership enables customers to deploy Oracle FCCM architecture within interconnected regions where customer can innovate using the best of OCI and Microsoft Azure with seamless interoperability.

Deployment architecture

The deployment architecture deploys the three tiers of the stack across OCI and Azure cloud environments.

Application tier running in Azure

The Oracle FCCM server is the node that hosts the product binaries, multi-threaded services for metadata management, and batch-processing frameworks.

Middleware tier running in Azure

The middleware tier contains the following components:

  • Oracle WebLogic server

  • Oracle Data Integrator (Required if using Oracle Financial Services Data Integration hub)

Database running in OCI

The database system is an Oracle database with up to three pluggable databases for the following components:

  • Configuration schema and application schema

  • Oracle Analytics (Required if you want to deploy the repository for Oracle Analytics in the same database)

  • Oracle Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Oracle Hyperion Essbase (Required for deployments that use the OLAP feature of Oracle Financial Services Analytical applications)

You can deploy supported Oracle Database server, Oracle Database Cloud service, and Exadata Cloud service database tier environment. This architecture refers to the Oracle virtual machine (VM)-based Database server.

The following architecture shows how you can deploy Oracle FCCM applications in a multicloud environment.

A graphic depicting the architecture for the Oracle FCCM use case.
Figure 1: Oracle FCCM deployment architecture

Prerequisites

  • An Oracle Cloud account. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up for an Oracle Cloud Free Tier account.

  • An Azure Cloud account. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up for an Azure Cloud Free Tier account.

  • Required permissions and quota to manage resources and associated application licenses.

Configuration

Follow each tier stack configuration guide to ensure that the required components are installed before you proceed to the validation section. To deploy the necessary resources as a shared network topology, you can follow this step-by-step guide to set up the interconnect.

Application tier configuration in Azure

Follow Oracle FCCM Suite documentation guide to install the Oracle Financial Crime and Compliance (OFCC) studio components.

Middleware tier configuration in Azure

Follow the WebLogic server documentation guide to install the required components.

Database tier configuration in OCI

Follow the OCI Database documentation to create a database system. You can also use the OCI Bastion service, which provides restricted and time-limited access to target resources that don’t have public endpoints like database nodes and connect over SSH if needed.

Validation

This section covers the connectivity tests of application, middleware, and database tier stacks on the two clouds. Connect to Oracle Compliance Studio graphical user interface (GUI) and test connectivity:

A screenshot of Oracle Compliance Studio testing code.
Figure 2: Compliance Studio GUI access

The following snippet shows the database connectivity test:


app-vm|/home/azureuser > sqlplus scott/DATA_Tiger_2022@DBDATA_PDB1
SQL*Plus: Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production on Wed Feb 16 22:45:10 2022
Version 19.3.0.0.0
Copyright (c) 1982, 2019, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 19c EE Extreme Perf Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 19.13.0.0.0
SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle Database 19c EE Extreme Perf Release 19.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 19.13.0.0.0
app-vm|/home/azureuser >

We validated the following components releases to support Oracle’s financial vertical use case within interconnected regions:

  • Azure: Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications (OFSAA) infrastructure, Version: 8.1.1

  • Azure: OFSAA, FCCM, Behavior detection, 8.1.1

  • Azure: Crime and Compliance Studio 8.1.1

  • OCI: VM-based database type, version: 19.13.0.0.0

Database performance benchmarking ensures that your application and middleware stack are performing as expected within two clouds.

Oracle recently announced Oracle Database for Azure service, which is a managed service that enables customers to easily provision, access, and operate enterprise-grade Oracle Database services in OCI with a familiar Azure-like experience.

Conclusion

This post guides you on how to deploy your Oracle Financial Crime and Compliance Management suite in a multicloud environment successfully and utilize OCI-Azure interconnect partnership to achieve maximum network performance of both clouds. To learn more about the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure Interconnect? Check out the Oracle Cloud Azure Interconnect on the Oracle Azure Interconnect and Oracle Financial Services today!