Don’t let legacy data management slow your digital transformation

How financial services can fuel agility, control risk and gain compliance confidence

As the boom of disruptive FinTech drives fierce competition, established banks and financial institutions are struggling to respond. Digital transformation has seen the demand for agile application development soar. Keeping up with the latest capabilities available on the market has become a competitive imperative. And, in turn, those rapid application- and feature-release cycles have created the necessity for a relentless stream of fresh data with which to test.

New entrants with just such agile data capabilities are introducing innovative applications and features – including the likes of PayPal’s introduction of Venmo – and are consistently releasing new, upgraded versions. Non-financial companies are also creating FinTech offerings, such as Uber’s launch of a full-service banking app for its drivers. These developments are being driven by customer experience expectations and demand for convenient online and mobile services.

With innovation rife within the FinTech space, businesses need to be able to outpace competition. Test data, and the ability to access, store and manage it for security and compliance reasons, is the key to developing applications with speed and agility.

What’s stopping the sector from saying “yes” to digital transformation?

Incumbent banks and financial institutions have the advantage of experience and reputation, along with vast amounts of transaction, market and customer data that can be used for developing innovative solutions. However, they face three major challenges when it comes to test management data. First, many still use legacy, monolithic systems, with siloed data, meaning that setting up testing environments is a slow, manual and high-touch process.

Secondly, security and compliance are ever-more complex, and can compromise agility. Efforts to drive digital transformation are often impeded by rigorous data privacy regulations and frequent audits. Customers and regulators expect invulnerable security, and the protection of financial assets and personal information – all of which can hamper applications’ time to market.

Thirdly, it can take days or weeks to provision test data, partly because most organisations operate queue-based request systems. All too often, teams have to work with stale copies of production data due to the complexity of setting up a new test bed. Huge amounts of time is spent manually resolving data-related issues, such as accuracy, in order to ensure data is compliant. Ultimately, that reduces productivity and slows the delivery of data to development teams.

Modern development (agile, DevOps, CI/ CD) requires the automation of test data in order to give developers fast access to the data and enable them to say “yes” to digital transformation. Test data automation enables accelerated application development cycles, expanded financial product offerings, and personalised customer experiences – while still protecting client and confidential financial data.

Driving differentiation with test data management

To stop data from slowing down digital transformation, organisations should seek a way of unlocking enterprise data and enabling fast, API access to virtualised data – all while protecting personal client information through masking sensitive data. A DevOps platform for test data management (TDM) is the answer to achieving this, enabling the business to access the right data in minutes (instead of days or weeks) and creating an agile environment for:

• Developing client-centric products and solutions
• Creating differentiated customer experiences
• Sharing data securely with partners
• Expanding the FinTech ecosystem and reaching new markets
• Complying with data privacy laws

Delphix’s DevOps Data Platform is designed to deliver on all of these strategic imperatives by automating TDM and enabling banks and financial services organisations to collect, virtualise, manage and efficiently deliver high-quality data.

For example, it provides test data APIs to deliver data in minutes with full control over bookmarking, branching, sharing, refreshing and restoring data. Integrated masking capabilities help identify sensitive information – such as names, addresses and credit card numbers contained in the data – and automatically mask the information according to security policies and data privacy regulations. Data masked with the platform is production-like in quality, and remains fully functional and realistic for accurate development, testing and analysis.

Let’s explore some more of the key reasons why a DevOps data platform is crucial to sustainable business profitability, value and continuity in the financial sector.

Innovate and accelerate application delivery

As game-changing solutions enter the market at a rapid pace, established banks and financial services organisations are under pressure to deliver innovation faster. Delphix enables development teams to reduce time to market for updating legacy applications and introducing new FinTech. This means businesses can fast-track new products and services, protecting existing revenue and creating new platforms to attract new customers.

Embrace cloud adoption and data management

Implementing a digital transformation strategy is key for banks and financial services organisations that want to leverage the advantages of the cloud to help reduce operational costs, increase agility and use the latest digital technologies. Delphix transforms how test data is managed in the cloud. Companies can migrate apps to the cloud faster and more efficiently, and also optimise their ongoing development processes by automating test data delivery for their DevOps and CI/ CD.

Expand financial product offerings securely

Banks and financial services organisations are increasingly relying on partners to extend their offerings and reach – but this can leave them open to security and compliance risks. They need a way to share data with integrators, payment processors, FinTech providers and new distribution channel partners without creating vulnerabilities. With a DevOps data platform, they have the means to share virtualised, production-quality data with ecosystem partners while ensuring that PII and PCI information is securely masked.

Minimise downtime, maximise developer productivity

Downtime for critical applications can impact customer experience (and an organisation’s reputation), which can negatively impact revenue. The Delphix DevOps data platform maintains an immutable data timeline, and its virtual data delivery enables rapid provisioning of point-in-time application data. Teams can deploy the latest known good data state in minutes, enabling them to recreate errors then quickly develop, test and release fixes to dramatically shorten recovery timelines. This enables the business to minimise losses, reputation impacts and regulatory penalties.

Achieve compliance confidence

Firms in financial services face a growing regulatory burden, and the pace of change is relentless – with new laws, agreements, and programmes such as GDPR, PCI, CCPA, Dodd Frank, SoX and SFTR. Disclosure regulations require frequent copy and transfer of sensitive data to regulators, while privacy regulations mandate that sensitive data be strictly controlled. The growing risk of data breaches provides additional motivation to secure key data. Delphix’s single-pane management of data and integrated masking capabilities make it easy to deliver high-value data where needed, secure data elsewhere – and audit every stage of the data management process.

Sustainable and cost-effective infrastructure

Cost management is a perennial issue, with the need to reverse shrinking balance sheets while creating new revenue options. Managing cloud costs gets even more challenging. Delphix drastically reduces the amount of storage and other hardware resources needed to maintain the non-production data footprint of a financial services organisation – reducing infrastructure requirements by up to 90%.

It’s time to say “yes” to digital transformation

We understand true business transformation is impossible without fast access to the right data, which is why we’re uniquely focused on accelerating the automation of compliant test data, and mitigating risk and cost across your business. Acting as a strategic partner in your digital transformation efforts, our DevOps Data Platform can ensure your DevOps teams say “yes” to delivering digital transformation projects to completion fast, securely and at scale.

The 2024 State of Data Compliance and Security Report

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