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Modern Infrastructure For Digital Transformation in Banking

Updated: Jun 19, 2024

Digital Transformation in a Bank

Are you struggling to build a robust infrastructure for software development and delivery? You are not alone

Any online seller has two objectives: Be the bestsellers and fast sellers in their sector. For that they need consistent & reliable delivery of quality products.

But often fault lines in infrastructure, commonly labeled as "infra issues" possess bottlenecks in their delivery, most of which can be prevented by taking proactive measures.

However, unfortunately when it comes to addressing infra issues, taking a reactive approach has been the norm. Although proactive measures can prevent these issues, they get ignored since they are considered non-billable or non-functional problems.

Today’s digitally transformed world faces various challenges when it comes to IT infrastructure such as


  • Unable to scale on demand during peak business hours. 

  • Securing intellectual property and services from threats online. 

  • Overspilling or under utilised infrastructure budget.

  • Sustain future growth trajectory.

  • Cultivate the right skill set and mindset for application lifecycle management.

  • Ensure reliability & consistency of releases. 


Here's a story from one of my own:


Digital Transformation in Banking:

A leading Business Banks in Indonesia was undergoing their Digital Transformation journey. They needed consistent and reliable delivery process from development to production for all the present and future applications. 


The objective was to build a centralised system for application lifecycle management system that can reduce the release cycle time as well as make them highly available for their customers.


The Challenges:

  • Manual steps for system setup, every server was a work of art. 

  • No Version Control for system-level changes. 

  • Despite using some of the latest tools and tech,  it would take days to do even a minor update or hotfix. This made the whole platform highly unstable.

  • Traditional bank IT - Ops and Dev sitting on different floors of buildings.

  • Multiple application architecture - micro-services on containers and monoliths on virtual machines. And not to mention a combination of linux and windows systems , some having oldest version of java and SAP.

  • This complexity and legacy systems lead to lack of automated build and deployment for even the latest containerised solutions.

  • Legacy tools used for application testing executed on manual triggers. No automation process, hence no CI process.

  • Lack of a centralised platform that can provide continuous integration  from dev to prod.

  • The containerisation platform was not ready for production. Instability of versions, configs etc due to lack of version control and config management.

  • Application development teams dependency on IT team for deployment would take days to release the product to prod.


The Initiatives:

  • An in-house release engineering platform with role-based access control, multiple platform api integration, and continuous delivery.

  • Infrastructure automation with configuration management.

  • Stabilisation and improvement of the containerisation platform.

  • Standard infrastructure topology for continuous delivery of all kinds of services and applications, be it monoliths/micro-services/windows/linux etc/

  • Identifying the bottlenecks of testing in the legacy framework and integrating the solutions in the same Continuous Delivery process.


We designed a standard workflow from dev to prod, adopting the latest and reliable containerisation technologies and configuration management tools available at the time. Each environment was as close to production configuration and composition as possible. Everything was automated, from setting up the systems to getting the site up and ready.


The Outcomes:

  • Product teams own production deployment and releases,

  • Zero dependencies on any Operations team for prod deployment

  • One click App deployment.  From days to minutes.

  • From monthly releases to weekly Releases.

  • Zero downtime upgrade for Continuous Delivery Platform.


Summary:

  • Digital transformation needs accelerators not bottlenecks.

  • Continuous delivery is not possible with an unstable assembly line.

  • Secure, scalable & sustainable modern infrastructure is the foundation for successful Digital Transformation.


If you like this article, I am sure you will find 10-Factor Infrastructure even more useful. It compiles all these tried and tested methodologies, design patterns & best practices into a complete framework for building secure, scalable and resilient modern infrastructure. 


 

Don’t let your best-selling product suffer due to an unstable, vulnerable & mutable infrastructure.



 


Thanks & Regards

Kamalika Majumder

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