DevOps has become a term that is thrown around in the FinTech space fairly often as of late – but what exactly is DevOps and what function does it serve for financial institutions?
What is DevOps Exactly?
DevOps is a strategy comprised of many different philosophies, practices, and tools that aim to focus more directly on a business’s ability to collaborate and deliver software with greater efficiency. The strategy has come to be massively important in the implementation of digital transformations in financial markets.
Embracing DevOps has become crucial for the digital success of banks and financial institutions. In this article, we will break down exactly what DevOps is and how it can be used to improve an organization’s operations.
Defining DevOps for Financial Markets
In traditional financial institutions, departments have typically been separated and siloed, making inter-departmental collaboration and communication somewhat tedious and difficult.
DevOps was created as a means for providing a solution to this challenge for businesses within all industries. Rather than dividing essential software development tasks up to be handled independently by each individual department, DevOps strives to keep all teams working together throughout the development life cycle.
By utilizing a DevOps strategy, financial institutions can provide much greater value to their customers and clients. DevOps is a highly adaptive form of development that allows for both heightened efficiency and customer satisfaction, while simultaneously lowering operational costs. DevOps is being used right now by many of the world’s largest financial institutions, and building a grassroots DevOps movement within your business can lead to stronger bonds with users and enhanced growth.
The Unification of Software Development and IT Operations
The term “DevOps” comes from a marriage of development (Dev) and operations (Ops) within an organization. This reflects the basic philosophy of DevOps – that software development teams and IT operations teams can work much more effectively when they collaborate.
A primary objective of DevOps is to remove barriers that prevent development and operations departments from working together. This allows for these teams to work as one cohesive unit, rather than as siloed departments.
How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps is not one singular action or strategy, but rather a collection of multiple practices and tasks that aid in the development and delivery of software to customers.
These tasks can include:
- Continuous development, integration, and delivery
- Enabling microservices that help to create better system architectures
- Configuration management and monitoring
- Use of Agile methodologies
Microservices and Agile methodologies, in fact, are two of the four essential layers of DevOps. The other layers include Infrastructure to Code and Build-to-Test.
What is the Role of a DevOps Engineer?
More than likely, most financial institutions without DevOps strategies already in place will not have a dedicated team or expert in the practice of DevOps.
Enter the DevOps engineer – a professional team with experience in both information technology and software development that can help to ensure an organization carries out its DevOps strategy to its fullest potential.
Responsibilities of a DevOps engineering team can include:
- Coordinating with both development and operations departments when designing and delivering software
- Automating essential workflows and processes
- Aiding an institution in migrating to a centralized digital space, such as the cloud, where development and operations teams can collaborate with greater ease
- Providing technical coding expertise, such as working with complex coding languages
We’ve found that when the engineer or DevOps team begins a grassroots movement within the company, this can result in the most success for financial institutions.
How is DevOps Used in Finance?
As the financial industry continues to move closer to total digitization, it has become necessary to embrace technological and virtual solutions for providing customers with essential services.
DevOps is used in finance to optimize the process of software delivery and development. Additionally, DevOps can help to greatly boost the security of a financial institution’s software systems – something that is crucial when dealing with sensitive financial data belonging to customers.
The Benefits of DevOps for Financial Institutions
By embracing DevOps, an organization can greatly improve their ability to deliver software and products to their customers. DevOps engineering can provide several benefits for financial institutions.
These benefits include:
- Greater Speed of Delivery: Using DevOps allows for software to developed, delivered, and updated at significantly improved rates.
- Continuous Development: Through automation of essential tasks and processes, DevOps can greatly improve an organization’s ability for continuous development and integration.
- Reliable Implementations: DevOps professionals are experienced in not only software development and coding, but in digital transformation as well – thus allowing for DevOps to aide greatly in achieving reliable implementations of digital platforms and applications.
- Heightened Collaboration: Collaboration is truly the name of the game when it comes to DevOps – and this collection of practices and tools can immensely improve an institution’s ability to collaborate across departments.
Final Thoughts
As the world continues to become more digitally-dominated, it is essential for financial institutions to adopt practices and strategies that strengthen their technological capabilities.
DevOps provides a unique opportunity to vastly improve an organization’s ability to deliver and develop software. This ultimately can help to lower operational costs and increase customer satisfaction by removing barriers to collaboration.
For more information on Building DevOps into Financial Institutions, or to begin adopting a DevOps strategy into your own financial institution, get in touch with CPQi today!
