Why DevOps for Finance Organization?
In today’s digital reality, rapid and continual value delivery has become essential for businesses to remain competitive in the market. Modern companies become more flexible to provide better customer interactions. And banking and financial institutes are not an exception. The greater need to exceed customer expectations and the high volume of transactions make the finance sector one of the busiest industries. Financial services enterprises have a growing demand for uninterrupted customer service and robust internal infrastructure for seamless operations.
So naturally, we are all on the lookout for an effective solution. You may wonder what it is.
DevOps Adoption Trend in Financial Services Industry
DevOps in Banking and Financial organizations helps exceed emerging demands. This practice helps you deliver value to the market safely, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Therefore, many Banking, Financial services companies and Fintechs have already realized the need to upgrade legacy banking infrastructure. DevOps methodology, tools, and practices have emerged as the mechanism to lead digital transformation. DevOps practices help boost the quality of application releases and address governance, security, risk & compliance strategies.
As far as DevOps adoption goes for financial businesses, we may rank financial services among the leaders in DevOps practice maturity, alongside tech industry players. They are leading the change when it comes to speeding up innovation and adopting modern software delivery practices such as agile, continuous delivery (CD), and DevOps. Some of the demands for the Financial sector are:
- Growing data volumes
- An expanding cross-channel presence
- Secure, low-latency data exchanges
- Customer experience
So if you’re considering the adoption of DevOps, this blog post will answer all of your questions. Moreover, if you have already implemented the DevOps methodology within your Banking or Finance organization, we will share with you the best practices to take full advantage of the revolutionary DevOps innovation.
Key Benefits of Implementing DevOps in the Financial Services Sector
DevOps is a set of tools and practices to optimize operational workflows, processes, and software delivery pipelines. But why is DevOps a key methodology practice for the banking and financial services industry? Well, you may review some of the reasons that make it really beneficial for practicing it.
Improved Security & Compliance
The Banking and Financial Services sector deals with a great number of transactions and investments on a daily basis. Therefore, it is crucial to secure sensitive data & comply with multiple security and data privacy compliance requirements and regulations.
The adoption of well-established Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) helps automate software lifecycle pipelines. Automation wherever necessary ensures impeccable software delivery deprived of human errors. Improved security is also guaranteed with best practices that DevOps preaches: better-documented development and testing processes, regulatory compliance processes with clear frameworks for application governance, risk management, and security.
Process Automation & Improved Time-to-Market
DevOps automation approach in software development and infrastructure operations fosters greater consistency and reliability to promote more frequent & faster deployments.
You can count on process accuracy from software updates, software delivery pipelines, and testing environments setup to server monitoring and logging. Automated deployment of applications across development, testing, staging, and production eliminates the need to perform mundane and time-consuming tasks.
Regular feedback from end-users & Accurate Business Forecast
When you integrate automation across most of the operation processes, you would have more accurate business predictions. This is also ensured by executing continuous application performance monitoring. Enterprises can exceed their value delivery by providing rapid feedback and flawless product operations.
Increased Collaboration within Teams
The DevOps methodology is all about alignment & collaboration between development and operations teams and across different departments. Many financial services providers have geographically dispersed enterprises and typically outsource their business operations. Thus, effective collaboration between teams is crucial for achieving and maintaining operational stability.
Cost-efficient business operations
Isn’t it exciting when all those perks also come with the opportunity to reduce costs? And yes, you guessed it-automation. Essentially, the DevOps-empowered cycle cuts costs by reducing engineers’ manual work and shortens time-to-market. Practically it may be that you need a smaller team for infrastructure management, as well as you dynamically scale your infrastructure up and down depending on the traffic you get.
DevOps methodology also reduces the cost of computation as it enables you to dispose of good application design, better-predicted cost analyses, and good execution policies.
Essential DevOps Best Practices for Financial Services Industry
1. Continuous integration and continuous deployment CI/CD for financial institutions, Fintech, and Banking organizations
Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) encourage frequent integration of the code into the main branch. It basically passes every application change through a set of automated tests before getting it to the build. This process helps you detect bugs earlier in the delivery lifecycle and eases software integration. This way, every update that gets to build hops into production right away.
Moreover, CI/CD speeds up the software delivery lifecycle reduce time-to-market, and make continuous delivery possible.
2. Continuous testing
Continuous testing is the process of integrating automated testing at many stages of the software delivery lifecycle instead of postponing it till the last stage. This way all produced code is tested dynamically from the build till deployment, thus significantly improving product quality. What this means is that you test early, often, and fast continuously.
Continuous testing assesses risk coverage, acts as a precaution, improves product quality, and ensures comprehensive coverage. We use load testing, application performance monitoring, performance testing, production testing, stress & scalability testings, and more to ensure optimal performance, a scalable and stable environment, high failure tolerance, and excellent customer experience.
3. Infrastructure as code (IaC)
Adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows you to provision servers automatically and automate many of the routine infrastructure processes and operations that previously required massive IT resources. IaC has the added benefit of increasing security: Automating processes improves infrastructure consistency, thus making it more secure, reliable, and not to mention cost-effective. For more benefits of Infrastructure as Code, you may review our exclusive guide to understanding its concept as well as the best practices you’d want to implement.
4. Adopt DevSecOps
DevSecOps allows you to build pipelines that remain compliant with financial regulations and security standards. The DevSecOps software development approach encourages the end-to-end collaboration of development, security, and operations teams throughout the software development lifecycle and the automation of their tasks. Consequently, it results in frequent and secure software releases. Thus, security is integrated into your delivery pipeline and the mission-critical applications are fortified with maximum security.
Some of the benefits of injecting security into your delivery pipeline include improved security & product quality, reduced time-to-market, minimized maintenance costs, greater collaboration between teams enhanced regulatory compliance, and increased productivity & efficiency.
5. REALLY embrace the cultural shift
A successful DevOps adoption fosters active collaboration between development, operations, and security teams.
There are necessary components to maintain a successful DevOps mindset and its cultural transformation is where it begins. Imperative understandings that support an organizational shift toward a DevOps methodology include:
- A healthy understanding of the organizational impacts of a DevOps initiative;
- Defining a joint plan for reaching desired outcomes;
- Transformational leadership.
DevOps outsourcing services for the Financial Services Sector
Is it a good idea to outsource your operations to a trusted DevOps services provider? Certainly YES.
Outsourcing is a common practice of contracting out business functions and processes. There are many reasons why a business may choose to outsource some routine operations, and it all comes down to the recognizable benefits it brings such as:
- Lower costs.
- Variable-capacity: let’s say you need 20 people with cross-tech expertise for the project build phase you’re at, and in 6 months’ time, you only need 2 people for routine monitoring and management. It’s convenient to contract an expert third-party team, right?
- Have your in-house teams increase their focus on strategy optimization and core competencies.
- Access to expert skills and resources thus increases efficiency.
- Increased flexibility to meet changing business conditions as you have your routine operations done elsewhere and more focus on refining your core strategy.
- Accelerated time to market due to the matched expertise and compliant procedures.
So can ITGix help you there?
As a DevOps services provider company, we help financial organizations reap all the benefits of the DevOps methodology. Our expert team brings unmatched technical expertise across a range of tools and services that provide real value to your business.
ITGix team helps embed security at all stages of the delivery pipeline. We help reduce costs by offering better collaboration between teams and accelerating time-to-market. Moreover, we help you identify the right technology stack and tools that will best align with your governance, security, risk & compliance requirements.
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Read 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 experienced AWS team built a highly available, scalable, and secured environment following the latest security and operational best practices!
One Response
Very informative! As the world of finance technology keeps advancing, DevOps methodologies are essential in fostering creativity, improving productivity, and guaranteeing the provision of top-notch products and services.