Supercharge your Developers with agile and a DevOps Platform

To remain competitive in today’s financial services environment, organizations must deliver services and products at a rapid pace. This is the main focus of many digital transformation efforts, which has only increased in the last year due to the increasing demand for digital capabilities.

Cloud adoption is increasing across financial services. Effective delivery is measured in terms of frequency. This refers to how frequently new features, updates, changes, and completely new services are delivered.

To meet this growing demand for continuous delivery (CI/CD), DevOps tools, practices, and agile methodologies are being adopted. Organizations should not adopt DevOps in pieces across departments or business lines. Instead, they should adopt or build DevOps platforms quickly to gain an edge over less agile counterparts.

A quick break from legacy

Customers are no longer willing to wait for long lead times or upgrade core functions. For both developers and customers, this is quickly becoming an inefficient and frustrating delivery method.

Agile and DevOps offer a way out from this model. This allows products to be broken down into smaller value streams or microservices that can be delivered and iterated continuously.

DevOps, at its core, is an approach to allowing developers to concentrate on their best work by automating tasks that are not only time-consuming but essential. Platforms are more effective than specialized DevOps tools for scaling across an organization.
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Free your developers with a platform

Gartner states the benefits of the platform more starkly, predicting that 90% of enterprises “will fail to scale DevOps initiatives if they do not create a shared self-service platform.” The reason for this is that DevOps is costly to implement piecemeal, as bespoke tooling, technology, and talent are required for different services, which naturally increases technology ownership and overheads.

Financial services require that we ensure applications are secure and compliant. It is time-consuming to ensure that each application has the correct tools, technology, and quality checks. Domain specialists are required to monitor and intervene throughout the entire application development process. For example, the regulatory issues surrounding a payment application will be different than those for a loan application. The technologies used to build them will also differ.

A platform model allows for the creation of quality gates and regulatory frameworks, which provide service teams with the assurance that applications will comply with quality standards and be compliant. The platform’s built-in guardrails will stop non-compliant applications from reaching customers.

These processes are built into DevOps platforms so developers can focus on innovation and ideation, which are the heartbeat of any enterprise.

Developers can experiment with new features and have the freedom to fail while reducing their cognitive load. They can still fail quickly and learn from their mistakes, according to CI/CD.
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Improve the developer experience

DevOps increases delivery but a flexible framework for organizing features and functions is also important. Microservices are becoming more important, which is why we need to take a more focused approach to software delivery.

As important as adopting technologies that allow services to be delivered in this way, the team structure must reflect this.

DevOps can be described as cross-functional. Automation of processes allows for the elimination of hand-offs, and increases work in progress. Agile allows for teams to work together and share ownership over the entire development process.

An agile model places responsibility on the service team for monitoring, security, QA, and testing. A DevOps platform provides a pre-determined method of managing them. This improves the developer experience and speeds up the delivery of new features and services.

Agile, when paired with a DevOps platform provides continuous feedback that allows for reliable and frequent delivery. This is rapidly becoming the ideal model for software delivery.

To avoid being one of the 90% of businesses Gartner predicts will fail in scaling their DevOps initiatives, financial services companies should adopt a platform model. To maximize the agility dividends, they should also implement agile as their orchestration structure.