As I mentioned in my previous article, DevOps is a software delivery methodology aided by people adopting a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement, and organizations can improve efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. In this article, we will examine the reasons why DevOps is a key methodology for the payment industry.
In today’s digital adoption world, secure, reliable, and faster time to market is essential to remain relevant and competitive. Banking, Finance & Insurance services companies (BFIS) are no exception to this. BFIS companies have to manage growing demands for uninterrupted digital channels to meet customer expectations, and robust infrastructure & operations are critical.
The Payment Industry, which is part of the BFSI domain, handles a huge number of transactions daily. Hence, it is paramount to secure sensitive data and comply with various regulatory requirements, including data privacy and security.
The adoption of well-established continuous integration & deployment (CI/CD) and continuous testing help automate software lifecycle pipelines. Automation, wherever necessary, ensures error-free software delivery. Improved security is also ensured with best practices that DevOps proponents.
Additionally, a mature DevOps team can adopt Infrastructure of Code (IaC) methodologies to automate their manual provisioning infrastructure and scaling activities.
DevOps key pillar automation in software development and infrastructure operations fosters consistency and reliability to promote frequent, faster deployments and infrastructure scaling.
Automated deployment of applications across development, testing, staging, and production reduces the manual involvement of performing mundane and time-consuming tasks. Combination of IaC and CI/CD ensures process accuracy from OS and software updates, environments setup to server monitoring and application performance monitoring & alert management.
The DevOps methodology emphasizes the importance of collaboration & communication between development and support operations teams. Many financial services providers have offices across cities and countries. Thus, effective collaboration between teams is crucial for achieving and maintaining operational stability. Enterprises can achieve their value delivery by providing faster & timely feedback.
Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD)
Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) encourage frequent integration of the code into the main branch. It basically enables every application change to go through a set of automated tests before getting it to the build. This process helps you detect bugs earlier in the delivery lifecycle and eases software integration. Moreover, CI/CD speeds up the software delivery lifecycle reduces time to market and makes continuous delivery possible.
Continuous testing is the process of integrating automated testing at many stages of the software delivery lifecycle instead of postponing it till the last stage. This way, all produced code is tested dynamically from build to deployment, thus significantly improving product quality.
Infrastructure is the components required to support the operations of an IT application. It consists of hardware such as servers, data centers, desktop computers, and software, including operating systems, web servers, etc. Traditionally, an organization installs and manages its infrastructure manually in its own data centers. But today, a de facto method of hosting infrastructure is in the cloud.
The fast pace of computing power in the payment industry often leads to resource dearth. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) brings a structured approach to overseeing infrastructure. It simplifies the process of deploying, managing, and scaling infrastructure through the utilization of code. It allows DevOps teams to provision servers automatically and automate many of the routine infrastructure processes and operations that previously required massive IT resources.
DevSecOps allows you to build pipelines that remain compliant with financial regulations and security standards. The DevSecOps software development approach encourages secure development & testing practices throughout the software development lifecycle and automation of repetitive tasks. Consequently, it results in frequent and secure software releases. Thus, security is integrated into your delivery pipeline, and the mission-critical applications are fortified with maximum security.
Some of the benefits of injecting security into your delivery pipeline include improved security & product quality, reduced time-to-market, minimized maintenance costs, greater collaboration among teams, enhanced regulatory compliance, and increased productivity & efficiency.
“Adopt a DevOps mindset”
By adopting DevOps practices, payment processing organizations can speed up their software development and release cycles, improve collaboration, and reduce go-to-market timelines for new products and features. A closer association between Development and Operation teams and a continuous feedback mechanism help teams improve their design, coding, testing, and release activities.
With the right mindset and cultural shift, payment processors can successfully embrace DevOps practices, which help improve collaboration among various teams, increase flexibility and agility, enhance scalability and reliability, improve security and compliance, and reduce costs.
