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By Priyanka Negi, Senior Technical Writer, Hie HQ

Gartner defines DevOps as: “DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology— especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”

These days, DevOps has an influence on almost every software-powered company. Nonetheless, organizations in the finance industry may have been the slowest to adopt DevOps. They are, however, undoubtedly at the forefront of digital innovation in this area of cloud-native technology at present. 

Let’s uncover DevOps in fintech and discover how it can modify the fortune of the fintech industry for the better.

What is DevOps

Patrick Debois, who later rose to prominence as one of its gurus, first used the term “DevOps” in 2009. The phrase “DevOps” was created by fusing the terms “development” and “operations,” which offers a place to start when figuring out exactly what individuals mean when they use the term. Notably, DevOps isn’t a method, a tool, or a rule. DevOps is frequently referred to as a “culture,” and New Relic supports this idea. In addition, we refer to the “DevOps movement” when discussing issues like adoption rates and potential future trends, and the “DevOps environment” when describing an IT organisation that has embraced a DevOps culture.

It’s significant that the definition of DevOps has expanded to include any methods, practises, and ways of thinking that are utilised to accelerate the software development life cycle and produce functionalities, corrections, and upgrades more regularly.

You may be interested in 9 Ways to Describe DevOps to Someone Who Is Not In Tech

The main precursors to DevOps are:

•  An Extension Of Agile

DevOps might be understood as an offshoot of Agile—agile software development mandates collaborative efforts of consumers, product management, developers, and QA to fill in the voids and quickly advance towards a better product. The product team must deal with these issues as a top-notch priority since DevOps recognises that product delivery and how the app and systems communicate are fundamental segments of the quality proposition to the client. DevOps, seen from this angle, is merely an extension of Agile concepts to include the full delivered service.

• IT Service Management

IT Service Management (ITSM) is the practice of managing the entire life cycle of information technology services, from their initial conception and development to their ultimate delivery, maintenance, and retirement. ITSM includes processes for managing the development, delivery, and support of IT services, as well as establishing service level agreements and service models. ITSM also includes processes for managing the availability of IT services, such as incident and problem management, and change and configuration management.

• IT Operations Management

IT Operations Management (ITOM) is the practice of managing the day-to-day operations of IT systems in order to ensure that they are running at optimal efficiency. This includes managing the availability, performance, security, and backup of IT systems. ITOM also includes processes for monitoring and reporting on the health of IT systems, as well as for responding to incidents and problems. Additionally, ITOM includes processes for managing changes to IT systems, such as configuration and patch management.

What Is the Current State of DevOps In Fintech?

For a long time, financial organisations managed their infrastructure with the greatest caution. They deployed systems that were developed over many years, and it was very hard to alter the framework or operations.

The current state of DevOps in fintech is a rapidly changing landscape. Companies are increasingly investing in DevOps initiatives to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and stay competitive in the market. One of the vastest financial institutions in the world that uses DevOps techniques is Bank of America. Nearly 4,300 retail financial centres and roughly 16,600 ATMs are supported by their digital enterprise operations. 

What Can DevOps Bring to FinTech?

The fundamental objectives of DevOps-Fintech processes and practices, however, are consistency, safety, and reliability in innovation. DevOps enables organizations to automate processes and procedures, allowing them to quickly and easily deploy new features and applications. Additionally, as fintech has become more complex and interconnected, DevOps provides a way to manage multiple technology stacks and platforms in a secure and scalable manner. As the industry continues to evolve, DevOps will continue to play an important role in helping fintech companies remain successful and secure.

DevOps adoption hence offers improved security, continuous server dependability, and quicker upgrades. Financial institutions can use the DevOps strategy to safely exploit a variety of quickly developing technologies, such as blockchain and AI, and keep up with current Fintech sector advances. 

Benefits Of Deploying DevOps in Fintech

1. 1. DevOps in fintech ensures speedy delivery. Businesses that have embraced DevOps are viewed to be changing, enhancing, and updating themselves significantly more frequently than those that have not.Encouraging DevOps practices like a delivery pipeline, the code can open up a whole new world of functionalities and aptitudes as well as enforce great discipline. With this, gaining access to GitHub and BitBucket services like multi-branch, pull request detection, and organisation scanning becomes effortless. In other words, it quickens the software development and delivery process.

1. 1. DevOps in fintech strengthens security practices. Security is a crucial component of any organisation, especially one that deals with money. Financial services deal with funds, money transfers, and more, so it is imperative that any data associated with them must be safeguarded. For this, the finest software application that complies with the leading cloud security standards and guidelines is required. Development security operations, also known as DevOps as security compliance for software, is a crucial discipline required when using DevOps.

1. 1. DevOps in fintech ensures minimal downtime. Enterprises may lose hundreds of thousands of dollars due to infrastructure failure in just an hour. In the financial services sector, the costs associated with unanticipated disruptions are also very substantial. In this fiercely competitive industry, no one, least of all a financial services company, could manage such infrastructural breakdowns.There is another option to reduce downtime: Enter DevOps. Using a fintech software app, which involves enabling a company to have a collection of separate and customizable services and requires a microservice architecture for its development, enables businesses to deploy with minimal downtime. It is quite helpful in controlling all the implementation difficulties and maintenance problems.

1. DevOps in fintech brings in cloud support and availability. Gadgets are decentralising banking services. People are now used to having constant access to financial services, commodities, and guidance thanks to mobile apps created by the fintech industry. You need to be able to offer all of this assistance and programs through your fintech application. You don’t need to hire support staff or set up a sizable infrastructure to use cloud services to provide reliable around-the-clock help.Cloud-based SaaS platforms keep the app available and provide auto-scaling functionality to handle the increase in demand depending on the shifting consumption habits of the customers.

What Are the Best Ways of Adopting DevOps in Fintech?

• Configuration Management 

As a particular source of trustworthy information for their configuration, a CM system makes sure that all software and hardware resources in a firm are always known about and tracked. That entails employing a version control system (VCS), or an up-to-date and accessible database of these assets, across their whole lifespan.

Systems and software can be thoroughly duplicated and managed using CMS and VCS, frequently through an automated process, and development can be easily rolled back in the event of issues. This brings us to business agility—the capacity to adjust and improve continuously while wasting little time and money during the process.

• Infrastructure As Code

The biggest security threat to financial companies comes from human mistakes in IT; the more likely a manual process is to involve human malfunctions, the more security risks there are for the business.Agile principles are being adopted by businesses across their entire organisation. However, if the IT division, which depends on manual methods, causes operations to be prolonged, Agile won’t function.

You may automate numerous activities that formerly needed a lot of IT personnel by embracing an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) DevOps philosophy. The additional advantage of IaC is that it improves security because process automation removes human discrepancies from the mix at every step of the procedure.

A European bank slashed its IT infrastructure team by 45% after switching to standardised, automated infrastructure products, according to McKinsey.

• Unifying Teams

Massive, multi-regional, or international corporations frequently exhibit disintegration. Few people are able to “see” the processes as a whole, as a result. This results in the creation of artificial barriers that impede effective communication and slow down all IT operations. Communication and frequent feedback are required between the numerous teams working on the project/product. Furthermore, DevOps meets this requirement. 

Barclays declared in 2015 that it was implementing DevOps as part of its digital transformation process. As of right now, Barclays handles payments that account for almost 30% of the UK’s GDP. 

The leadership team at Barclays commended DevOps for substantially decreasing the complexity of their codes, which permitted them to decrease delivery hazards and, inevitably, enhance the services they provided. As a result, developers’ self-esteem and code quality expanded.

• Automation and Frequent Monitoring

A consistent process is provided even by the most basic pipeline (develop, verify, deploy, launch), which lessens the amount of security effort required of your team. All packages going via a conveyor that has been made absolutely comply with financial legislation and necessary security measures are compliant. In a DevOps culture, automation is a vital asset for high-performing teams. 

Capital One began its DevOps journey in late 2011 with only two teams. Integration testing, vulnerability scans, unit testing, and functional testing were all first carried out separately from development sprints by distinct test teams because the teams were unfamiliar with the automation approaches. Later, after realising the value of a genuine partnership, they successfully automated this testing and incorporated it into the dedicated DevOps teams. 

As they adopted a DevOps culture and standardisation and connected integration, security, and performance testing to a Continuous Delivery pipeline, they gradually shifted all testing into the development sprints. They have more than 700 Agile teams following constant delivery as of 2016.

Conclusion

To satisfy stringent corporate and regulatory standards, financial services organisations may need complicated and severe software development procedures. To meet expectations and outperform the competition, companies must yet deploy software more rapidly than before. 

In such complicated situations, DevOps engineers can help change an organization’s future for the better by optimizing the best technologies and techniques. The use of numerous assisting tools and improved procedures, along with DevOps, can help the software development team produce better outcomes while developing, evaluating, encrypting, and incorporating new code. DevOps in fintech is a promising solution for financial institutions. DevOps is finance’s future.

Contact the DevOps Institute Business Solutions team to map out the best plan to support your IT organizational digital or transformational journey.

Priyanka Negi is a professional tech writer at Hie HQ. With a deep passion in content writing, Priyanka has been dedicating her experience in crafting insightful, unique and useful content that engages the audience and adds value to the modern readership.