My experience with a majority of the Fortune 500 financial organizations has taught me that customer experience is key to the success of the financial services institution. This comes with value based services, secure financial transactions and a positive customer engagement.  It sounds simple and in a bygone era where banker’s hours meant something, i.e. 9am to 5pm, the right thing was understood because the customer interaction with the financial organization was a personal, human experience.

Organizations are challenged with the rapid pace of technology advancements

Now, shift into the digital age with technology augmenting the human experience and what you have is the ability to reach more customers, at any time, with self service capabilities.  This sounds great but in order to accomplish these objectives, the financial organizations are challenged with the rapid pace of technology advancements, cyber threats and compliance regulations.   Technology advancements that include new dynamic financial applications, mobile banking and digital currency are causing a ripple effect that necessitate IT infrastructure updates.  Cyber threats are emerging daily and are becoming more difficult to detect.  Data protection and the associated compliance regulations with regard to privacy and data residency continue to place organizations at risk when adherence measures are not introduced in a timely manner.

Financial Applications certification can take weeks, if not months

One of the key challenges with IT infrastructure updates is that the IT organization is always in a “catch up” mode due to the lack of capabilities that allows them to quickly meet the business requirements.  The problem is exacerbated given the following resource constraints:

• People: Teams working in silo’s may not have a methodology or a defined process
• Tools: Open source or proprietary, non-standardized tools introduce false positive results
• Test Environments: Inefficient, lack the required test suites, expensive, manual processes
• Time: Weeks and months required to certify updates
• Budget: Under financed, misunderstood complexity leading to cost overruns

The net result of these challenges is that any certification process for a financial application and the associated IT infrastructure can take weeks, if not months.

Quali’s Cloud Sandbox approach to streamline validation and certification

Quali solves one of the hardest problems to certify an environment by making it very easy to blueprint, set-up and deploy on-demand, self-service environments.

Quali’s Cloud Sandboxing solution provides a scalable approach for the entire organization to  streamline workflows and quickly introduce the required changes. It uses a self-service blueprint approach with multi-tenant access to enable standardization across multiple teams. Deployment of these blueprints includes extensive out of the box orchestration capabilities to achieve end to end automation of the sandbox deployment. These capabilities are available through simple, intuitive end user interface as well as REST API for further integration with pipeline tools.

Sandboxes can include interconnected physical and virtual components, as well as applications, test tools monitoring services and even virtual data. Virtual resources may be deployed in any major private or public cloud of choice.

With these capabilities in place, it becomes much faster to certify updates – both major and minor – and significantly reduce the infrastructure bottlenecks that slow down the rollout of applications.

Join me and World Wide Technology Area Director Christian Horner, as we explore these concepts in a webinar moderated by Quali CMO Shashi Kiran. Please register now , as we discuss trends, challenges and case-studies for the FSI segment and beyond on June 7^th, 2017 at 10 AM. PST