For the Financial Services sector, keeping up with the fast-changing environment has always been a challenge. Given the critical nature of data financial companies deal with, they have been rather slow embracing modern technological innovations.
However, as the race to acquire (and retain) customers and to provide uninterrupted service gets increasingly intense, there’s a lot Financial Services can benefit from DevOps tools and practices.
The Growing DevOps Market in Financial Services
As tech advancements make their way through Financial Services, organizations face an array of challenges in adhering with new standards established by industry stalwarts. Moving workloads to the cloud and modernizing back-end processes and systems to support today’s digital age is a constant endeavor. Add to it the need to endlessly mitigate risks, to ensure better security, while complying with regulations and conforming to governance requirements.
As the industry looks to drive innovation across internal operations, adopting modern software delivery practices, such DevOps can enable them to drive value faster, more efficiently as well as more safely. Using DevOps, companies can not only increase the quality of their applications, but also address governance, risk, security, and compliance requirements.
The Many Benefits of DevOps
Despite all the apprehensions about adopting new tech, Financial Services Organizations are warming up to the concept of DevOps to enhance overall productivity.
Here’s a list of the many benefits of DevOps for Financial Services:
- Enhanced security and compliance: In the Financial Services sector, compliance and security are two aspects most organizations struggle to achieve. However, using DevOps, companies can detect issues early in the lifecycle and take action before they become major problems. By putting more emphasis on collaboration, continuous testing, and faster feedback loops, teams can integrate security as a core component of DevOps processes. Since DevOps helps to reduce potential security threats, Financial Services companies can more easily enable and enforce compliance, security, and audit requirements. The new DevSecOps concept takes security a notch higher. It allows teams to integrate security in the development process from the very beginning, so it is baked across every stage, including design, build, test, release, support, and maintenance.
- Greater visibility and transparency: When it comes to software development, many Financial Services companies get off to a rocky start. In the absence of a streamlined software development method, frequent delays, changes in direction, rework, increase in cost, and occasionally project cancellation are rife. That’s where DevOps can help. By improving communication and collaboration between the different teams, it ensures organizations to get started on the right foot. Because every resource is aware of and is updated with the activities of every other resource, there is more visibility into the different processes, toolchains, and infrastructure. Such transparency brings in a great degree of governance and control, helps reduce the chances of errors and delays, and allow teams to optimize the delivery pipeline even as they evolve.
- Faster time to market: Given the intensity of competition and the pace of changes in the Financial Services sector, companies are constantly seeking ways to quickly bring products to the market – before their competitors. DevOps, through the automation of mundane, every day, error-prone processes enhances resource utilization and developer productivity, thus ensuring faster time-to-market. Such automation leads to reduced risks and more frequent releases, that enables Financial Services firms to drive speed and scalability. Through the consolidation of tools and standardization of processes, across the delivery pipeline, teams can release products more frequently to meet the growing needs of their customers, while staying ahead of the competition.
- No silos: For Financial Services companies, eliminating friction between geographically-dispersed teams and breaking down functional silos is also important to build high-quality products – within time and budget. DevOps allows teams to orchestrate every aspect of the software development process to create repeatable, predictable processes – with minimal human intervention. By breaking down silos between teams, DevOps eliminates fragmented processes and manual handoffs – thus enabling shared control and visibility – so products can offer a seamless experience to users across various touchpoints.
- Cultural change: As Financial Services customers get increasingly tech-savvy, organizations need to deliver products that meet (and exceed) their expectations. However, the traditional, conservative mindset of the industry can restrict companies from driving true innovation. DevOps focuses on building a culture where people from across the business, operations, quality assurance, development, and testing work collaboratively. In addition to standardizing tools, automating processes, and embedding security practices across the development lifecycle, it drives a cultural shift that empowers stakeholders to work towards a shared goal.
Build a culture of collaboration
Staying competitive in the age of increasingly accelerated disruption requires Financial Services companies to rethink their software development strategies.
To drive transformation, teams need to drive collaborative efforts towards building high-quality products – no matter how different their processes, systems, and cultures have been in the past. DevOps allows Financial Services organizations to overcome the growing list of challenges that plague companies every day while allowing them to enhance security and compliance, achieve greater visibility and transparency, bring products to market faster, break down silos and build a culture of collaboration.
