Implement IT automation to work smarter, better and faster in financial services

In modern times, financial markets are sensitive to any number of factors – geopolitics, economic data, shifting prices on commodities, regional unrest, even market sentiment. And that sensitivity puts pressure on financial firms also contending with globalization, market competition and changes in regulation and international capital movements. To thrive amid all that – and work smarter, better and faster – consider IT automation. Want to know more? Check out this Red Hat solution brief.

IT automation that’s rooted in open source can help banks manage their infrastructure, applications and even processes; foster collaboration across the enterprise; assist with the implementation, management and enforcement of policy, regulatory and security controls; and support comprehensive maintenance and management functions across all systems on or off premises. IT automation is also viewed as key to successful digital transformation – and financial firms, like those in so many other sectors, are advancing their digital capabilities to develop new products, services or entirely new business models.

In fact, according to Red Hat’s 2nd Annual Global Customer Tech Outlook, a majority of survey respondents are in the midst of digital transformation – with 37% working on their strategy and another 33% planning to introduce new products or services to facilitate the digital transformation in the next 12 months.

In Red Hat’s IT Automation solution brief, we outline five benefits of automation for financial institutions, and also look more closely at how Red Hat Ansible Automation for financial services can help.

1. Complete Automation IT automation is so much more than configuration management and siloed scripts. Effective automation tools stretch across the entire IT process, to provision resources, make configuration changes, and run commands across a variety of environments - helping financial institutions works faster and with less risk.
2. Simple Collaboration Financial firms are complex organizations, with complex processes that rely on complex tasks and decision-making. If coordinating all of it involves manual mechanisms, innovation can be hampered. The simpler the enterprise is to end users, the better, and automation helps simplify things.
3. The People Engine When automation is simple, more people can collaborate. And that can mean increased communication, better ideas, increased productivity and ultimately greater innovation.
4. Control and Governance Again, financial institutions are complex. And they involve sensitive financial and customer data governed by strict regulations and requiring tight security controls. With Red Hat Ansible Tower, users can implement  role-based access control to improve reliability, consistency and management across the organization.
5. Tame Complexity Even as financial firms adopt cloud and other next-gen technologies, they won’t abandon their legacy systems overnight. And these existing systems still need maintenance and support. IT automation is designed to assist in managing complex, disparate infrastructure that spans on-premise and off-premise resources.

Automation with Ansible Red Hat Ansible Automation is an easy-to-use IT automation engine. It is designed to automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and intra-service orchestration for a wide range of use cases across your on-premise and cloud environments.

Ansible Automation is agentless, so there is no need to install (and manage, patch and support) software on each managed host. Ansible Playbooks are human-readable and describe an entire application environment, reducing the likelihood of miscommunication and streamlining the change management process. This openness allows everyone to communicate in a common automation language and fosters collaboration across the enterprise.

Red Hat Ansible Tower is an enterprise framework for controlling, securing and managing your Ansible Automation. Via a  visual dashboard, Ansible Tower enables role-based access control, job scheduling, and graphical inventory management. The role-based access control makes it easy to add, review, update, and delete permissions, and administrators can delegate automation jobs in a controlled and auditable way, centralize credential management, and provide provisioning, configuration, and policy control workflows. Policy application and enforcement can also be automated to increase security, governance, and compliance across infrastructures.

To learn more about the five benefits of automation, and how Ansible Automation helps deliver these benefits, download and read our solution brief.