The banking industry has undergone a significant transformation, driven by digital innovation. To meet the rising expectations of customers and maintain operational excellence, banks should embrace Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). This discipline, originally conceptualized by Google, combines software engineering practices with infrastructure and operations to create robust and scalable systems. By adopting SRE, banks can enhance system reliability, improve performance, and streamline operations. This blog post explores SRE, its tools, mindset, and governance, as well as the benefits of SRE for your bank. We will outline a strategy for adoption, discuss the roles of business and IT teams, and provide an implementation roadmap.
What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?
The key principle of SRE is to embrace the risk that failure is inevitable and focus on managing acceptable levels of risk measured through clear, measurable targets for system performance and reliability (Service Level Objectives (SLOs). The performance and reliability are implemented through capacity planning for future, automated monitoring and alerting to quickly and predictably identify issues, eliminating toil with automation to focus on valuable work, and learning from failures through blameless postmortems.
Why is SRE crucial for Banks?
Banks, financial services and SaaS Fintechs have benefited from adoption of SRE. A large payment service provider improved system uptime (99.99%) with SRE adoption including chaos engineering & custom monitoring tools to track transaction latency and success rates in real-time. Similar benefits were experienced by Banks and Fintech’s in digital mortgages, algorithmic trading, mobile banking, core banking and fraud detection systems. Their experiences demonstrate how SRE practices can significantly improve the reliability, efficiency, and performance of critical banking functions leading to enhanced customer experiences, reduce operational costs, increased competitiveness.
- Reduced downtime: According to a study by ITIC, 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. SRE practices can significantly reduce such incidents.
- Improved operational efficiency: Banks have reported a 50% reduction in deployment times after adopting SRE practices.
- Enhanced security: SRE's emphasis on automation and standardization can help reduce human errors, a common source of security vulnerabilities.
- Better compliance: SRE practices can help in maintaining detailed logs and audit trails, crucial for regulatory compliance in banking.
- Competitive advantage: By enabling faster, more reliable digital services, SRE can help your bank stand out in a crowded market.
- Improved customer satisfaction: The focus on performance optimization and reliability translates to smoother and more dependable experience for the customer
- Enhanced business continuity: Proactive identification and mitigation leads strengthens bank’s resilience to disruption ensuring continuity.
DORA Compliance
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is an EU regulation that requires financial entities to test their operational resilience regularly in line with regulatory requirements. Here is why SRE can play a key role under this regulation:
- Monitoring and incident response - SRE teams excel in creating advanced monitoring systems that provide real-time insights into system health. By setting service level objectives (SLOs) and using tools for altering and logging, SRE can help organizations detect issues before they escalate into full scale failures, reducing the time to recovery and aligning with DORA’s stringent incident management standards.
- Focus on operational resilience – Integrating SRE solutions directly contributes to increasing operational resilience as mandated by DORA via using automation, monitoring to prevent downtime and mitigate impact of outages ensuring continuous delivery of services.
- Risk management – SRE reduces the risk of human errors via automating routine tasks and implementing “blameless postmortems” where focus is on learning from failures rather than assigning blame. This helps banks proactively manage risks and enhance system resilience and meet DORA’s mandate for improved risk management and remediation.
In an industry where security failures and breaches can have far reaching consequences, SRE helps banks and financial institutions maintain compliance, safeguard their systems and protect customers ultimately supporting a robust financial ecosystem.
Strategy for SRE Adoption
- Before embarking on an SRE journey, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of your organization's unique needs and objectives. This involves conducting a thorough assessment of your current IT infrastructure, identifying pain points, and defining the desired outcomes of SRE adoption. By establishing a solid foundation, you can ensure that your SRE strategy is aligned with your overall business goals and sets you up for success.
- You should start small with a pilot in a non-critical area to demonstrate value and gain experience. You should cultivate a culture of shared responsibility between development and operations teams. Roll out SRE practices across your organization in phases, learning and adapting as you go while establishing clear metrics for success and continuously refine your approach based on results.
- Business team’s leadership is essential As a leader, your executive sponsorship is essential for successful SRE adoption. Encourage cross-functional collaboration between IT, risk management, compliance, and business units to ensure that SRE initiatives align with organizational goals and mitigate potential risks. Be prepared to invest in the necessary resources, including tools, training, and potentially new hires, to support SRE adoption. Work closely with your risk management team to identify and address any potential risks associated with implementing SRE practices. Finally, implement a robust change management strategy to help your organization adapt to new ways of working and embrace the benefits of SRE.
- Innovative and capable technology team is critical to SRE adoption Your technology team plays a critical role in SRE adoption. They should choose appropriate tools for monitoring, automation, and incident management and revamp existing IT processes to align with SRE principles. They should collaborate with business units to define clear Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for critical services. Within IT, they would need to break down silos between development and operations teams to create a unified SRE culture.
How to Implement SRE
SRE requires tools, a redefined service mindset and an effective governance.
Tools: SRE teams use a variety of tools to support their work:
- Monitoring and Observability: Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog for real-time system monitoring.
- Incident Management: PagerDuty, OpsGenie for alerting and on-call management.
- Configuration Management: Ansible, Puppet, or Chef for automated system configuration.
- Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Jenkins, GitLab CI, or CircleCI for automated testing and deployment.
- Container Orchestration: Kubernetes for managing containerized applications.
- Version Control: Git for tracking changes in code and configuration.
- Chaos Engineering: Tools like Chaos Monkey for proactively testing system resilience.
SRE Service Mindset: The SRE mindset is characterized by:
- Proactive problem-solving: Anticipating issues before they occur.
- Data-driven decision making: Using metrics and SLOs to guide actions.
- Continuous improvement: Always looking for ways to enhance system reliability and efficiency.
- Collaboration: Breaking down silos between development and operations.
- Automation first: Seeking to automate repetitive tasks wherever possible.
- Embracing failure: Viewing failures as opportunities to learn and improve.
SRE Governance: Effective SRE governance involves:
- Clear ownership: Defining who is responsible for each service and its reliability.
- Error budgets: Establishing acceptable levels of system downtime or errors.
- SLO management: Regular review and adjustment of Service Level Objectives.
- Incident Response Protocols: Establishing clear procedures for handling and escalating issues.
- Change management: Implementing processes to manage and track system changes.
- Knowledge sharing: Promoting the sharing of best practices and lessons learned across teams.
- Metrics and Reporting: Regular reporting on key reliability metrics to stakeholders.
SRE Implementation Roadmap
Before implementing SRE practices, it is crucial to have a well-defined roadmap that outlines the key phases and milestones. This roadmap should be based on a thorough assessment of your current IT operations and aligned with your overall business objectives. By following a structured approach, you can ensure a smooth transition to SRE and maximize its benefits for your organization.
- Assessment (1-2 months): Evaluate current IT operations and identify areas for improvement.
- Planning (2-3 months): Develop a detailed SRE adoption plan, including resource allocation and timelines.
- Pilot project (3-6 months): Implement SRE practices in a small, controlled environment to demonstrate value.
- Training and tool implementation (6-12 months): Roll out comprehensive training programs and implement necessary tools.
- Gradual rollout (12-24 months): Extend SRE practices to other parts of the organization, starting with less critical systems.
- Continuous improvement (Ongoing): Regularly assess and refine your SRE practices based on performance metrics and feedback.
How Coforge can enable you with our SRE capabilities
As part of Coforge’s SRE practice, the key service offerings include
- DevSecOps + SRE Maturity Assessment
- SRE Strategy & Roadmap Development
- DevSecOps+ SRE Services Build, Run and Operate
Key outcomes that can be expected out of Coforge’s SRE target operating model include
- Improved MTTR
- Reduce cost of operations, enhanced productivity of employees and reduction in time to market
- SLA based/KPI driven managed services support to proactively prevent outages Prevent repeated operational issues
- Improved service availability
Coforge has delivered value to various clients in this regard including Banking and financial institutions. One such US based client that works with corporations, financial institutions and professionals, and ultra-high-net-worth families faced challenges with limited licenses of Dynatrace (leading to frequent uninstallation to shift from one environment to another), high time spent in alert/issue and log analysis, Difficult to identify impact of an issue on other components due to manual correlation among other issues faced. Coforge’s solution with deployment of Dynatrace and configurations helped in value delivery such as
- Up to 50% effort reduction in analysis and logs
- Ensuring 24*7 availability of platform with acceptable response time
- Automatic correlation of issues across the transaction flow and technology components potentially reducing incidents in LEM by up to 15% y-o-y4)
- 100% availability of monitoring across all application environments
Conclusion
Adopting SRE practices can provide your bank with a competitive edge by improving reliability, efficiency, and innovation speed. SRE can help you deliver better services to your customers while optimizing costs and managing risks effectively. As with any significant organizational change, successful SRE adoption requires commitment, investment, and patience. However, the long-term benefits in terms of improved operations, customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage make it a worthy strategic initiative for forward-thinking banks.
