DevOps in the finance world
In brief, DevOps is a methodology and a set of best practices and tools used by development and operation teams who join forces with a common goal to improve software products and make faster and more secure software delivery. Teams using DevOps to create production software are much faster than organizations using traditional infrastructure management and software development methods. In the financial services industry, where money is constantly changing hands and the demand for an uninterrupted digital banking experience is continuously increasing, DevOps is one of the most innovative development practices for finance software solutions.
Benefits of Implementing DevOps in the BFSI sector: How is DevOps transforming the Financial Services?
- Enhance compliance and mitigate potential security threats
In the BFSI sector, security and compliance are major concerns. The adoption of DevOps has shown consistently to effectively reduce potential security issues and help locate issues and tackle threats more quickly. Financial services providers have embraced DevOps automation practices to enforce compliance, security, and audit requirements.
- Automate all possible processes
Automating the processes all through the SDLC is another key practice to optimize resource utilization, and enhance product quality and team productivity. Essentially, it facilitates enterprise-scale management and thus allows visibility in financial services. For any true DevOps initiative, automation has become a major must to enable speed and agility, ensuring scalability, compliance, and higher product quality.
- Orchestration
The implementation of DevOps is embraced rapidly in the financial services industry due to its global, systems-level approach. DevOps enables an end-to-end, robust pathway to production.
Eliminating differences between teams by breaking down functional silos is achieved by orchestrating every aspect of the software delivery pipeline. This is the key to creating repeatable, highly predictable processes to deploy frequently and with minimal human intervention. This prevents many of the challenges distributed companies face and provide visibility.
DevOps outsourcing for Financial Services
Each year the Financial sector significantly grows globally. The dynamic development of technologies such as Open Banking, Cashless, micropayments, and Blockchain has created a huge potential for the development of the industry so far dominated by huge legacy organizations. Thousands of startups and SMBs sprung up to make groundbreaking changes in the financial market before our own eyes. This is why customers’ expectations changed, as their requirements in terms of Customer Experience, availability, and flexibility of financial services have increased significantly.
The foundation for providing financial software products to meet all customer and regulation requirements is obtaining a stable, scalable, secure, and flexible infrastructure. And DevOps is the methodology used to succeed. However, surveys that are being continuously conducted show that many companies struggle to get started with DevOps. That is the reason behind the need for trusted DevOps outsourcing. A trusted DevOps provider will implement Financial software development projects based on the experience gained during cooperation with clients in the BFSI sector. It is crucial for banks and other financial institutions to innovate with financial software development outsourcing providers. Banking DevOps outsourcing services might be a good extension for your financial software development company.
DevOps Outsourcing and Consulting can involve several areas depending on the project, tech stack, teams, application structure, and budgets:
- DevOps End-to-End Implementation
- CI-CD Pipeline Orchestration
- Infrastructure as Code
- Application Release Automation
- Containerization
- Microservices Architecture
- Cloud Migration & Managed Services
What to look for? DevOps Outsourcing Considerations and Guidelines for Financial Services Industry
Choosing the right DevOps provider is crucial to the success of your financial software product and thus to your business. So here are our recommended considerations to have in mind while assessing the competition:
- Technical Expertise
As you examine a prospective outsourcing DevOps partner’s technical capabilities, ask those questions:
- Does X have the relevant experience, skills, and tools in use that I need?
- Is this a core competency of the company? This might be relevant in terms of better expertise: Knowledge sharing and support from experienced team members, as well as professional training, are the core benefits of partnering with a DevOps provider.
- How does this company go about attracting and training new talent?
- What certifications do they hold? It is important to look for certifications obtained in the areas and technologies you’re using in your projects.
And here is what to specifically look for:
DevOps engineers have programming language expertise that includes Python, Ruby, PHP, and Java. DevOps considers infrastructure as well as applications, so a trusted DevOps outsourcing company has expertise in infrastructure-correlated software and tools such as Docker, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack. Relevant expertise and certifications for networks, databases, and operating systems are a must.
A DevOps provider must be experienced with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD and the tools which support the associated processes. Popular tools include Jenkins and GitLab, Ansible, and Terraform.
- Experience with projects within your sector
In order to succeed in DevOps outsourcing, you need a DevOps partner who has relevant experience in your business vertical and in the system functional area of your target project. That would mean that they are informed about security and operational requirements and standards, and address compliance, security, risk, and governance strategies that affect your industry. Moreover, they can also be your key consultant on more than just infrastructure management, but also business prosperity and performance optimization. A good partner will benefit greatly from your success, will help you prosper, and guide you to achieve it all. Dive into use cases, whitepapers, and client lists to verify their expertise and the value they can provide for your specific projects.
- Communication
When considering an outsourcing DevOps partner, evaluate their ability to communicate often, clearly, and transparently. A partner who communicates poorly or isn’t one hundred percent honest at all times can derail a relationship that has all the right methods and tools in place for success. Proper communication skills and a culture of trust and transparency are key to a successful partnership. The right partner can help you overcome any number of unforeseen issues along the way.
- Commitment to Continuous Training
As you evaluate a DevOps outsourcing company, make sure that continuous training is a part of their business model. A good partner invests in their employees’ training. In ITGix for example we support regular renews of certifications and actively advocate for new ones to be obtained. You can learn more about our company culture that nurtures continual education here.
Can we help you there? Read our BFSI case studies!
DevOps helps streamline development and operations and thus improve the quality, efficiency, and delivery pace of software.
As a trusted DevOps services provider company, ITGix helps organizations of all sizes in the BFSI sector reap all the benefits of DevOps practices. Apart from obtaining substantial expertise with all high-profile technologies, we have extensive experience working on various projects in the banking, financial, and fintech industry. ITGix expert team brings unparalleled industry-specific, deep technical know-how across a range of DevOps tools and services to provide true value to your business.
ITGix team embeds security at all stages of the SDLC. We help reduce costs by inducing better collaboration between development and operation teams and reducing the time-to-market. Moreover, we help you identify the right technology stack and tools that will best align with your governance and risk & compliance requirements.
You can benefit from our deep technical expertise and recommended DevOps best practices for the Financial Services industry here.
Check out our portfolio!
Review our expert use case on the setup of a multi-environment Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant AWS infrastructure for proxying financial transactions. Our specialized AWS team has built a highly available, scalable, and secured environment following the latest security and operational best practices!