Cloud-native development and automation for financial services

July 20, 2020•
Resource type: Brief


“Our market changes
quickly. To keep pace,
we need reliable,
efficient deployments
and collaborative
processes. Red Hat
has helped us reduce
deployment times
and strengthen
our competitive
advantage.”

James Hixon
Senior Director, 
Cloud Automation and
Engineering,
Ally Financial

Introduction

Financial institutions benefit from the capabilities and efficiencies provided by cloud-native development, like application programming interface (API)-driven programmable orchestration and DevOps and continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) methodology. Whether building new applications or refactoring or rearchitecting existing applications to extend legacy services, embracing cloud-native development provides a competitive advantage. 

Customer-centric business models are leading innovation and change in the financial industry. Customers expect more digital services, greater personalization, and access to their accounts 24/7 on any device. Coupled with the need for greater speed and agility, institutions are also challenged with a host of regulatory requirements, security specifications, and legacy policies.
Each new product, service, and application opens a potential risk. With improved application development and operational pipelines, i.e., DevOps, for continuous delivery, along with automated system logs and patching, financial services companies are better positioned to address these challenges. When you build with a cloud-native development strategy, you can rapidly provide innovative products and services while meeting security, compliance, and corporate standards. 

From new methodology to the new normal

Financial institutions are not new to using cloud applications.However, to truly benefit from all that cloud-native development has to offer, they must go beyond simply counting the number of applications running in the cloud to building apps for the cloud. Cloud-native development is an application development, deployment, and operational discipline, spanning people, process, and technology. It combines modular architecture like microservices, containers, and API-driven programmable orchestration with DevOps practices and automated workflows to enable continuous application delivery. And, as Kubernetes becomes the de facto container-orchestration system for application deployment, cloud-native development has rapidly become a critical part of business. 

Benefits of containers and cloud-native development

Cloud-native development is much more than just a programming model or a new way of writing code. It changes the entire life cycle of how requirements are collaboratively developed, coded, tested, and deployed. While cloud-native applications can be deployed on other infrastructures, Linux containers with Kubernetes orchestration have emerged as the dominant option for cloud-native deployments. 

Cloud-native methodologies allow financial services to:
 

“We know we have to
adapt, and that we have
to be quick to make
these changes. We
wanted to provide a
successful model that
can be adopted by all
of the companies in the
Santalucia Group.”

Javier Sanchis 
Chief architect IT department, 
Santalucia Seguros

  • Open data sources to third parties and regulators more securely to comply with regulations such as PSD2, CMA, GDPR, and CRS.1
  • Deploy anywhere within the datacenter and public cloud and scale as the business requires. 
  • Provide a consistent developer experience across the enterprise using best practices.
  • Deliver application releases, updates, patches, and bug fixes frequently, independently, and more reliable with CI/CD. 

Built for innovation

Every financial services institution tries to differentiate their business to attract, retain, or grow relationships with their customers. Cloud-native development helps companies get to market faster, adjust existing products more easily, and respond rapidly to the digital demands of customers.  A cloud-native development approach built with security and using  open source platforms, runtimes, frameworks, and tools helps enterprises take advantage of the automation and scalability of technologies like Kubernetes, so they can innovate and bring new ideas to market faster.

Cloud-native development helps you: 

  • Adopt or expand the use of microservices to develop business agility.
  • Respond quickly to customer needs with a continuous delivery model.
  • Get the most from all your environments with increased portability. 

Red Hat and cloud-native development
Cloud-native development for financial services companies involves more than providing a better digital experience for account openings or a faster credit approval. It aligns business goals with IT and fosters a more productive partnership. With Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform and Red Hat Middleware, you can build a foundation of open tools and technologies that empower developers to design, develop, deploy, and integrate cloud-native applications across any cloud infrastructure.

Learn more

See how hybrid cloud and cloud-native development provide the infrastructure and tools to harness innovation and elastically scale to meet customer demand. Visit www.redhat.com/fsi.
 

Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Common Reporting Standard (CRS)