The decision to migrate a core banking system to the public cloud is not one financial institutions make lightly. For Shinhan EZ Insurance, a rapidly evolving market demanded IT infrastructure that could scale quickly and respond to new business demands without friction. The existing stack couldn’t deliver that.

Legacy DBMS solutions—Oracle and Sybase among them—carried rigid licensing structures that directly undermined the cloud’s core promise of elastic, on-demand scalability. Beyond flexibility, the cost trajectory was untenable: Maintenance costs were on a continuous upward path with no natural ceiling. 

Staying the course meant accepting growing constraints on the business at the exact moment when speed, agility, and sovereignty mattered most.

Choosing EDB: Three criteria that decided it

After evaluating a range of DBMS options, Shinhan EZ Insurance converged on EDB based on three decisive factors.

The first was compatibility. EDB PG AI’s high compatibility with Oracle meant the team could minimize application modifications and dramatically reduce migration risk, a critical consideration when moving mission-critical financial infrastructure.

The second was total cost of ownership. Compared to the legacy licensing model, EDB’s cost structure was substantially more rational, making large-scale infrastructure transformation financially viable.

The third was support. In a financial system where 24/7 availability is nonnegotiable, the quality of the partner matters as much as the technology. EDB’s global engineering team and professional support structure played a decisive role in giving Shinhan EZ Insurance the confidence to proceed.

“EDB’s professional support structure, backed by a global engineering team, played a decisive role in securing our operational stability,” Kim notes.

A migration built for zero disruption

The migration of EZONE, Shinhan EZ Insurance’s next-generation core banking system, was executed with data integrity and service continuity as the governing priorities. Using EDB’s Migration Toolkit, the team moved methodically to minimize downtime and ensure that when the cutover came, it happened cleanly.

The resulting architecture reflects the demands of a financial environment that cannot afford disruption. Standard operational databases run on an active/standby configuration using LifeKeeper. For the most critical systems—insurance core, channel systems, and customer data—a replica layer was added on top of standard redundancy, creating a sophisticated three-tier active/standby/read-only architecture that achieves both load distribution and maximum availability simultaneously.

The outcome speaks for itself: Shinhan EZ Insurance is currently maintaining highly stable service across its cloud environment, on infrastructure that can scale without constraint.

A sovereign data and AI foundation for what comes next

The business impact has been measurable and rapid. Shinhan EZ Insurance recovered its full investment costs within six months of adopting EDB and reduced annual operating costs by more than 50% compared to the previous environment.

But Kim points to something harder to quantify as the more significant achievement: the ability to immediately support new services requested by business teams, without infrastructure becoming the bottleneck.

“Our greatest achievement is the ability to instantly support new services requested by business teams—made possible by a stable, highly scalable infrastructure,” he says.

Looking ahead, Shinhan EZ Insurance intends to extend EDB PG AI as the standard infrastructure for new business expansions, while continuing to integrate AI and big data capabilities into its operations. That future—AI-integrated, cloud-native, built for continuous expansion—depends on owning the infrastructure underneath it. The sovereign data and AI foundation Shinhan EZ Insurance has built with EDB makes it possible.