The technology approach taken by DevOps, which includes the containerisation of applications, serverless computing and continuous development, is the new frontier for cloud service delivery. Along with software development trends such as vendor agnostic API development and various types of abstraction layers, containerisation pushes the complicated IT coding needed to integrate applications into a network into the hands of a few who, subsequently, make downstream development significantly easier and less resource intensive. Containerisation of the application environment makes the delivery of integration code for applications within a container simpler to manage, scale and change. Developers can put almost all their efforts into the development of the functionality for their applications rather than having to extensively consider the underlying infrastructure requirements.
The degree to which a financial institution can exploit the cloud model – a key benefit of which is the ability to reduce costs – depends decidedly on which services it chooses to migrate, the migration strategy, the depth and availability of relevant skillsets within the organisation and whether or not the next generation cloud solution of the specific cloud provider with which the company chooses to partner with is fit for purpose.
