Finserv open source infrastructure powers digital transformation

Covid-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges and opportunities for financial institutions to embrace digital transformation initiatives at pace and scale.  Finservs are enhancing their purview of digital transformation initiatives to stay relevant and create a technology foundation that enables them to quickly bounce back from future contingencies.

Finserv digital transformation is spurred by technology, and the leading technologies spurring digital transformation are open source. It is fair to say that  open source technologies are playing a key role in digital transformation.

Financial institutions require a comprehensive portfolio of digital infrastructure and interconnection choices, both physical and virtual, and a wide range of cloud, and SaaS options to deliver that change.

Finserv digital infrastructure

Despite the growth in public cloud computing, financial institutions often need to use a combination of public and private (on-prem) clouds. Often overlooked in the hype around public cloud computing, the private clouds offer greater flexibility, security and compliance.

Financial institutions will need to leverage the right mix of cloud services – a hybrid cloud strategy to maximise application performance while on-boarding innovative new capabilities. A hybrid cloud provides orchestration, management, and application portability between public and private clouds to create a single, flexible, optimal cloud infrastructure for running a financial institution’s computing workloads.

Using cost effective open source private cloud infrastructure and placing workloads on public clouds with considerations for application performance, security and compliance,  economics and consumption model shall allow financial institutions to optimise their CapEx and OpEx costs.

OpenStack is the de-facto standard for open source private cloud build. OpenStack sits at the centre of the open source infrastructure stack, providing an interface for the virtualisation stack, SDN and SDS. It allows provisioning VMs on-demand from the self-service portal and allocates the required resources through the underlying platforms all managed and provisioned through APIs with common authentication mechanisms.

Beyond standard infrastructure-as-a-service functionality, OpenStack provides additional open source components for orchestration, fault management and service management amongst other services to ensure high availability of enterprise applications.

OpenStack for financial services

OpenStack provides a complete ecosystem for building private clouds. Built from multiple sub-projects as a modular system, OpenStack allows financial institutions to build out a scalable private (or hybrid) cloud architecture that is based on open standards.

OpenStack enables application portability among private and public clouds, allowing financial institutions to choose the best cloud for their applications and workflows at any time, without lock-in. It can also be integrated with a variety of key business systems such as Active Directory and LDAP.

OpenStack software provides a solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to end users through a web portal and provides a foundation for layering on additional cloud management tools. These tools can be used to implement higher levels of automation and to integrate analytics-driven management applications for optimizing cost, utilization and service levels.

OpenStack software provides support for improving service levels across all workloads and for taking advantage of the high availability capabilities built into cloud aware applications.  

Charmed OpenStack

Charmed OpenStack is an enterprise grade OpenStack distribution that leverages MAAS, Juju, and the OpenStack charmed operators to simplify the deployment and management of an OpenStack cloud.

Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack ensures private cloud price-performance, providing full automation around OpenStack deployments and operations. Together with Ubuntu, it meets the highest security, stability and quality standards in the industry.

Frictionless open source cloud infrastructure

OpenStack gives financial institutions the ability to seamlessly move workloads from one cloud to another, whether private or public. It also accelerates time-to-market by giving financial institutions’ business units, a self-service portal to access necessary resources on-demand, and an API driven platform for developing cloud-aware apps.

One does need to acknowledge that OpenStack is a growing software ecosystem consisting of various interconnected components. In order to provide a frictionless open source private cloud infrastructure to financial institutions, Canonical offers fully managed services so that finservs can focus on building innovative applications and not worry about infrastructure build and maintenance. Canonical’s managed OpenStack provides 24×7 cloud monitoring, daily maintenance, regular software updates, OpenStack upgrades and more. 

We are always here to discuss your cloud computing needs and to help you successfully execute your hybrid cloud strategy.  

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Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash