This article is the third part of a four-part series titled How to keep your systems running, reduce risk, and enable growth post-Covid-19. Recent events have caused a change in Financial Markets Technology risks and our mini-series will help you rebalance your budgets to:

  • Ensure the integrity of your current services in these unique circumstances
  • Simplify and reduce risks as well as medium-term costs
  • Develop new products and services to enable growth in line with the new budgeting techniques

Essential Risk Reduction

This first phase of the budget is needed to ensure the new baseline is met. However, organizations must consider how to reduce the complexity of their operations. This, in turn, will improve speed and guarantee robustness, as well as provide a better platform for growth.

A portfolio review needs to take place of the hardware, operating systems, architecture and applications to see where the following essential elements can be applied:

Cloud

Being able to move applications on to the cloud will reduce the complexity of the connectivity challenges during times of remote work. Institutions will be responsible for policy, but the technical domain of access and security will become that of the Cloud provider. This ease of accessibility enables production support and product release to take place more seamlessly with a multi-location strategy. Additionally, Clouds can be scaled up and down as per the need without requiring on-site presence.

Microservices

Developing code that has its inputs and outputs religiously defined means that code can be changed without system-wide testing or major interaction with multiple parties. This ensures changes are far easier and cheaper to do and also lend themselves better to home-working environments.

Build to test

Building code into automated testing scripts will enable testing to be performed and monitored remotely at a far lower cost and a higher rate of throughput.

Budgets must be allocated to improving and simplifying the portfolio of hardware and software that the organization runs, focusing on business delivery to the client. This second phase requires substantial support from the board room to push through and obtain the needed advantages. A senior director should be appointed for this change and a budget set firstly for review then for full approval of the improvement budget against each of these three categories.

This mini-series was taken from a paper written by our CEO, Terry Boyland. To read the entire paper, click this link.