Sakaar Anand SVP, Software Engineering, CA Technologies
With every industry embarking on a digital transformation journey, the day is not far off when technology mimics the human brain. Already, in today’s application economy, it goes without saying that 'today every business is a software business’. For example, a bank is a software company with a banking license. So exactly which businesses are true innovators and trendsetters in the digital transformation journey? And how and which software principles enable maximum mileage. Undoubtedly, it is DevOps that is powering the game big time and is a major game changer across industries.
While there are multiple industries, such as healthcare, logistics, supply-chain, manufacturing, transportation, construction, chemical, aerospace and many others, that have embraced technology big time, FinTech industry is one that has effortlessly merged technology with its core operations and processes. FinTech is one of the remarkable examples of amalgamation of Financial sector with DevOps implying a business-driven approach for delivering solutions using agile planning & development methods, collaboration & automation. A truly unified approach to merging software development and software operations seamlessly. DevOps applies agile values to operational tasks by ensuring continuous planning, continuous development, continuous testing, continuous delivery, continuous observability and continuous security to improve business outcomes and provide unbeatable customer experience.
Initially, financial sector took baby steps when it came to adopting technology by modernizing back-end processes and systems to support the digital age. But over the last few years, this sector has not only caught-up, but is leading the change when it comes to speeding-up innovation and adopting modern software delivery practices of Agility, Automation, Insights and Security. In a nutshell, it has been a classic case of technology first adopting the business, while later on business has adapted to the technology to retain customer loyalty.
Smart adoption of DevOps culture by the Finance sector surely helps reap rich dividends. But to continue the compound growth, there are a few unique aspects exclusive to Finance sector that need to be considered.
• Speed, accuracy and security must go hand-in-hand. One cannot be compromised for the other.
• In the application economy, applications need to be built, tested and deployed in parallel with continuous feedback loop to be on top of the game.
• While a continuous delivery & continuous integration tool chain is imperative, continuous observability & continuous feedback are equally important to improve the architecture & performance of the applications and in turn continuously enhance customer experience.
"A future with NO reactive fixes would be the ideal scenario with intelligent usage of generated logs to continuously improve the system to mimic human intelligence "
For example, security and compliance have always been the top two concerns in financial sector. Initially, with DevOps practices advocating increased velocity of software releases, DevOps was viewed as a risk to security. Instead of retrofitting security as an afterthought, with the shift left approach of baking security right from the word go, one can see how the business (finance sector) has adapted and made technology it’s friend to not only deliver customer expectations, but also exceed it resulting into evolution of DevOps to DevSecOps.
Moving on further, peering into the horizon is AI, which was seen as a gimmick a few years ago, which is again a gradual evolution from DevOps to DevSecOps continuing the adaption lifecycle. It offers a host of benefits such as improved security by detecting fraudulent behavior, suspicious transactions and potential future attacks. AI can help process information quickly by recognizing specific patterns to improve processing time. Helps analyze context changes, i.e., the user, the device, the user behavior and the data consumption pattern. AI understands approval workflows and allows restructuring & automating based on the change in context. With its ability to process huge volumes of data, AI can offer really game changing insights.
If one wants to know where India stands with respect to AI, with a heavy push towards Digital India, India will surely march ahead in the innovative usage of AI in the next few years. With India’s vast rural base, India is the best testing ground for apps that offer ease of use, convenience and most of all propel the system towards intelligent, self-correcting and self-reliant infrastructure with zero human intervention. A future with NO reactive fixes would be the ideal scenario with intelligent usage of generated logs to continuously improve the system to mimic human intelligence. Automation will progress from simple rule-based systems to complex and autonomous decision-making systems. With increasing emphasis on collecting insights about human behavior, very focused personalized services can be developed.
With the continual rise of AI, one can see the next incarnation of DevOps and that will be Cognitive DevOps. Operating AI-native (non-deterministic) software will be significantly more complex, as it will require continuous, proactive, creative testing, AI-training, monitoring, and adaptive evolution to remain useful. The AI-native software is going to change itself based on learning from past data and data from real-time sensors and algorithms will make decisions in real time. Add to this emerging Blockchain technology and distributed business models, and it is clear why DevOps(aka Cognitive DevOps) will be absolutely essential for every company. The wheels are just set in motion. The pace will quicken when we use AI to anticipate rather than react. All said and done, human intelligence truly lies in maneuvering artificial intelligence as humanly as possible.
"A future with NO reactive fixes would be the ideal scenario with intelligent usage of generated logs to continuously improve the system to mimic human intelligence "
For example, security and compliance have always been the top two concerns in financial sector. Initially, with DevOps practices advocating increased velocity of software releases, DevOps was viewed as a risk to security. Instead of retrofitting security as an afterthought, with the shift left approach of baking security right from the word go, one can see how the business (finance sector) has adapted and made technology it’s friend to not only deliver customer expectations, but also exceed it resulting into evolution of DevOps to DevSecOps.
Moving on further, peering into the horizon is AI, which was seen as a gimmick a few years ago, which is again a gradual evolution from DevOps to DevSecOps continuing the adaption lifecycle. It offers a host of benefits such as improved security by detecting fraudulent behavior, suspicious transactions and potential future attacks. AI can help process information quickly by recognizing specific patterns to improve processing time. Helps analyze context changes, i.e., the user, the device, the user behavior and the data consumption pattern. AI understands approval workflows and allows restructuring & automating based on the change in context. With its ability to process huge volumes of data, AI can offer really game changing insights.
If one wants to know where India stands with respect to AI, with a heavy push towards Digital India, India will surely march ahead in the innovative usage of AI in the next few years. With India’s vast rural base, India is the best testing ground for apps that offer ease of use, convenience and most of all propel the system towards intelligent, self-correcting and self-reliant infrastructure with zero human intervention. A future with NO reactive fixes would be the ideal scenario with intelligent usage of generated logs to continuously improve the system to mimic human intelligence. Automation will progress from simple rule-based systems to complex and autonomous decision-making systems. With increasing emphasis on collecting insights about human behavior, very focused personalized services can be developed.
With the continual rise of AI, one can see the next incarnation of DevOps and that will be Cognitive DevOps. Operating AI-native (non-deterministic) software will be significantly more complex, as it will require continuous, proactive, creative testing, AI-training, monitoring, and adaptive evolution to remain useful. The AI-native software is going to change itself based on learning from past data and data from real-time sensors and algorithms will make decisions in real time. Add to this emerging Blockchain technology and distributed business models, and it is clear why DevOps(aka Cognitive DevOps) will be absolutely essential for every company. The wheels are just set in motion. The pace will quicken when we use AI to anticipate rather than react. All said and done, human intelligence truly lies in maneuvering artificial intelligence as humanly as possible.