Resiliency in Banking : A ‘must have’ for continuity in the new reality (Part 2)

As cited previously, a new business operating environment - whether from an increasingly demanding customer ecosystem or as a result of external events - has necessitated new approaches to understand challenges, adapt, focus, and formulate the new normal. In addition to shifts in the ways consumers interact with banks, internal cultural reluctance to change can be an obstacle. Banking organizations have recognized the need for new operational approaches, but also have often been cautious in light of inherent risks - especially when combining a cloud, data center and on-premises model.

Resilience achieved in the hybrid cloud

For years, banks have used the cloud for noncritical systems such as email, customer relationship management, and application development - yet critical transacting applications (deposits, loans, etc.) have largely remained in place because of perceived security risks and the cost of modernizing these systems. 

Compounding the situation, the independence offered by cloud adoption resulted in banks having pursued different cloud providers, resulting in siloed configurations, inconsistent tools and procedures for monitoring, orchestration, and management. Correspondingly, as with on-premise, piecemeal solutions, some cloud providers hit limits in meeting the needs of the on-demand consumer, unable to maximize the true transformational potential in operational processes and services. 

With the promise of faster time to market for innovative products and services, cloud operations have been mandated by many firms - to decrease costs and improve operational efficiency with flexible, modern application development processes that include security and resiliency.

A hybrid cloud strategy draws on well-established controls in the datacenter, protecting desired business functions in a private cloud while extending other functions to the scalability of off-premise public cloud infrastructure - and even across different public clouds. As an open hybrid cloud, the architecture uses a combination of public and private clouds with some degree of workload portability between the two, and it has the choice of which data, applications, and services are kept behind corporate firewalls - regardless of vendor. The added flexibility and compute power improves internal efficiency and security, lowers costs, and enhances the agility needed to accommodate future digital evolution. 

Using open hybrid cloud concepts (along with containers, microservices, and cloud-native development tooling inherent with enterprise strategy) and applied to more than one public cloud (i.e. multi-cloud implementation), firms can benefit from outstanding approaches to application design, development and enhancement. The key is to develop a single strategy with increased uniformity that readily supports the bank’s ability to change configuration and adjust with demands.

Consistency in the operations and development perspectives: The future is open

The unification of cloud platforms serves as a driver towards effective automation, particularly the deployment of open hybrid cloud concepts that solve many inherent challenges. 

• Infrastructure and resources are gathered under a single toolset providing better visibility into operations and automating resource life-cycle management. 

• Administrators can delegate automation jobs in a controlled and auditable way, centralizing credential management, provisioning, configuration, and policy control workflows. 

• Policy application and enforcement can be automated to increase security, governance, and compliance across infrastructures. Administrators can keep pace with ever-changing security threats using more secure and compliant cloud environments.

• Simplify processes and automate tasks—including service requests, provisioning, and retirement—across environments, cutting management time and resource requirements. 

• Employ common, easy-to-use management and automation tooling to promote team collaboration. Emergent technology is an incentive to a new generation of developers and technical talent–it presents the chance to use and to be able to implement, rather than writing code from scratch. 

To achieve these goals, Red Hat has maintained an integrated cloud composite approach with an end-to-end solution, founded in open source community development, that adds capabilities and resiliency in operations. Extending well beyond the Linux operating system, streamlined operations can benefit from lower costs, greater flexibility, and scalability. Furthermore, insights and modeling are enhanced when the business is operated and optimized for the customer.

As a banking technology community member, and acknowledging the fundamental shift towards open banking that expands markets and allows for APIs to be part of an integrated economy, Red Hat stays active and contributes within open source banking organizations to foster usage among all. 

Red Hat can and does participate in:

• FINOS – FINtech Open Source community, now a part of  the LINUX foundation; Red Hat is a Gold member

• BIAN – Banking Industry Architecture Network, a community approach, partners and industry are dependent on its decades of cumulative work for continued expansion

Interested in Red Hat and its role in extending capabilities and resiliency of the banking sector through open source community development? Learn more of how Red Hat is helping banks here.