NETS CEE - Internal Cloud Platform

NETS CEE d.o.o., formerly known as Mercury Processing Services International, is a provider of payment solutions, dedicated to developing and managing its payment business on an international level. Apart from offering Issuing, Acquiring, and Value-added services, NETS CEE develops innovative solutions such as a Mobile Wallet solution, based on HCE technology, that enables cloud-based mobile proximity payments and opens endless possibilities of introducing new and innovative value-added services to end customers.

NETS CEE operates in 10 different markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, manages cardholder data for 6,9 million accounts, and averages processing 1,5 million transactions daily peaking with 87 transactions per second. Those are impressive numbers.

Continuously improving their IT services, NETS CEE decided to move into cloud-native space. Following the strategy of gradually raising the stakes, learning through pilots, and rolling out successes to the rest of the organization, they have put in place a basic Red Hat OpenShift configuration and were ready for pilot projects using the new infrastructure.

The goal was to implement an internal cloud platform with production and non-production environments in order to speed up the delivery of new functionalities, considering all the requirements of the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) regulation. The existing platform was slow and deployments were too interdependent which complicated each instant of deployment. The plan was to set up a cloud platform and upgrade the existing system to be microservices oriented in order to enable hard constraints to be broken down and independent system components to have independent lifecycle.

Additionally, the idea was to enable the development teams to automate all aspects by themselves, from build to deployment. This way, they would spare time and gain the flexibility to easily and quickly access the platform within which they can experiment and test before implementation.

The results of providing payments for numerous partners are various reporting requirements and a great amount of data that resides in heterogeneous Data stores, which impose development of an enterprise Data Warehouse – a collection of all organization’s data optimized for reporting. NETS CEE has engaged CROZ to make this possible. CROZ Data team helps transform raw data to meaningful information by integrating and consolidating data from various data sources to one centralized Data Warehouse (DWH) and creating visual representation of data – Business Intelligence (BI). This process includes source data analysis and profiling, dimensional model design, data integration (ETL – Extract, Transform, Load), and reporting (BI).

Data integration tool Informatica PowerCenter is used to perform ETL process: retrieving and integrating data from heterogeneous data sources, transforming extracted data to fit DWH structure, and loading the dimensional model. Depending on business requirements, ETL jobs are scheduled to run daily, monthly or quarterly.

Business Intelligence tool IBM Cognos is used to present data stored in DWH as valuable information in order to ensure better decision making for business users.