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Envision a world where you had to go to a store to make a purchase, a restaurant to pick up take out, or a bank to deposit or withdraw money. Sounds like antiquated remnants of some distant decade, right? Today, there’s almost nothing we can’t purchase online and have delivered right to our front door. The modern business landscape is more reliant than ever on banking apps and online payment methods—particularly in the age of COVID.
As a result, financial services organizations need an automated way provision complex environments for DevOps teams, so they can deploy code in accelerated time frames while maintaining quality and security—goals that can easily be achieved with infrastructure automation tools. In addition, financial industry compliance standards for data protection make security patches that fix vulnerabilities, and the speed at which they’re deployed, vital. The integral nature of financial data and security makes it critical that companies within this vertical be able to deploy patches and new application features quickly and effectively.
How Infrastructure Automation Speeds Deployment, Addresses Compliance, and Cuts Costs
Automating environment provisioning for development and testing addresses multiple issues that directly affect a company’s competitiveness and their bottom line. That’s one of the reasons infrastructure automation has become not just an option for DevOps, but an absolute necessity.
Speed of Deployments
The speed at which organizations can deploy applications is one of the biggest drivers of infrastructure automation for DevOps among financial organizations. With the proliferation of digital financial technology, the more quickly companies can react to market trends and push projects to market directly impacts how well they can provide service including new features and functionality to end users. The quicker they can do so, the more competitive they become.
Visibility & Governance
Providing access to development and test teams to quickly stand up and tear down dev/test environments on-demand strengthens application development by giving visibility and control to ITOps and discouraging rogue behavior that creates infrastructure sprawl, shadow IT, and subsequent security vulnerabilities. Role based access controls (RBAC) and single sign-on (SSO) functionality helps to ensure that developers access only approved environments that meet required compliance and security configurations. This allows greater access for development and testing teams without IT having to hand over sensitive login credentials. These protections can help maintain security and compliance policies which saves companies money and preserves their reputations.
Lower Costs
Automatic tagging and decommissioning of infrastructure environments help ITOps teams manage costs. Functionality that allows auto-tagging of environments by project and business unit provides added visibility into the consumption of cloud costs, so resource usage can be analyzed and managed more wisely. At the same time, the ability for Ops teams to configure the right environment for any given job and allow developers to access them almost instantly via self-service increases productivity—a key factor in the bottom line for any business.
Ability to Scale Quickly
All the above benefits of infrastructure automation—accelerated release cycles, reduced business risks, increased productivity, and lower costs—allow companies to scale more quickly by increasing the speed of innovation and growth, as well as making the most of financial and team resources. While the value of scale is tricky to quantify, financial services companies benefit by providing greater capabilities and delivering them to their consumers.
Why This is Important for Financial Services
Financial services businesses, by the nature of their industry and the products they deliver, deal with some of our most sensitive personal and financial data. For this reason, it’s paramount to have the tools and processes in place to protect it. Automating environments in a repeatable way that ensures your business’ security and compliance policies are being adhered to helps reduce mistakes that could potentially introduce vulnerabilities or other problems which may impact the quality or reliability of the application.
Infrastructure Automation also speeds the delivery of patches, new features, and new applications into production. But the added benefits of Infrastructure Automation are lower operating costs providing the ability to scale more quickly and easily, directly improving the bottom line.
If your financial services business isn’t taking advantage of infrastructure automation, you could be making your job a lot easier. For more tips on how Infrastructure Automation can help drive innovations in Financial Services, download our white paper, “Accelerating Financial Services Innovations Leveraging Environment as a Service.”
