Second largest bank in Germany drives efficiency in software delivery, developing and deploying new functionality more quickly to its business-critical applications, most prominently its trading platform, while ensuring auditability, security and compliance
CloudBees, Inc., the enterprise software delivery company, today announced that DZ BANK AG, the second-largest bank in Germany and the central institution in the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken cooperative financial network, is using CloudBees Software Delivery Automation solutions, including CloudBees CI and CloudBees CD, to accelerate delivery of new features to production for its customers. DZ BANK AG is the central institution for about 850 cooperative banks in Germany.
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At DZ BANK AG, IT leadership made the decision to transform to a DevOps environment about four years ago. They standardized process flows across software teams, incorporating repeatable, auditable processes while accelerating the release of new software features to production. They began this initiative with the single most important application within the bank: its trading platform. This platform supports about 1,000 users each day, executing trades, and another 2,000 users managing back-office functions including risk control and reporting. The environment within which all of this has been achieved includes CloudBees CI and CloudBees CD.
“We started our DevOps journey about four years ago with a single application. That application happened to be the most business-critical application within the bank – our trading platform,” said Dr. Julius Von Rosen, DevOps evangelist, DZ BANK AG. “The platform needs to be working 24×7. Our main business challenge with this initiative was to get to market faster. We needed to deploy more quickly and more frequently, but with a consistent, secure and repeatable process.”
At the time, about 200 developers supported the trading platform. DZ BANK AG looked across the various processes in place and standardized on a single common process for building components and one way of performing automated deployments. The reimagined process for the trading platform went live in a single weekend, without any disruption. Now they had a repeatable process in place for software delivery.
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“One success led to another and we were now able to work very fast, getting deployable code through the testing process and into deployment. We were able to run weekly reconciliations on repeatable deployable codebases, allowing reliable and traceable user acceptance tests,” said Von Rosen. “It just runs and runs and runs. Releases reach production on a weekly basis, processing thousands of changes a year. This was our first major win with our new processes and platform.”
Security was paramount to DZ BANK AG and their solution needed to integrate with existing best-in-class tools, particularly for separation of duties, credentialing and to comply with regulations of the European Central Bank.
“These capabilities close one of the biggest gaps for automated deployments,” said Von Rosen. “Our continuous integration and continuous delivery solution absolutely must integrate with our other security solutions. CloudBees enables that integration, seamlessly.”
This success on the largest, most critical application within the bank proved that all of the other applications could also follow this same process and other teams quickly migrated their applications to the same process.
“CloudBees brings a lot of experience to DevOps. They know the business and have been in it for 10 years. They enable DZ BANK AG to model our environment in repeatable ways for running continuous integration and continuous delivery,” said Von Rosen. “We now have a clear view of the entire process – one that is secure, repeatable and predictable.”
“DZ BANK AG is a perfect example of the importance of transforming to DevOps and doing it in an accelerated and tightly controlled way,” said Shawn Ahmed, senior vice president and general manager, Software Delivery Automation, CloudBees. “Transitioning enterprises to DevOps and automation is like turning a very large ship. However, DZ BANK AG approached it the right way, by bringing all their teams along in the process, working with them to define the standard approaches and then implementing automation and orchestration in support of the new processes. We are proud to be part of the solution that is helping DZ BANK AG to deliver even more value to their customers and shareholders.”
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