This is the first blog in a series focusing on digital innovations within the financial services industry where we look at some of the most common IT challenges through use cases in financial services enterprises, and how advancements in technological capabilities help manage these modern challenges around hybrid-cloud operations, starting with online banking services.

We've come a long way in online banking services technology since before the inception of the Internet. Early remote banking services began with telebanking as a precursor to what we now consider the more modern online and mobile options available today. The earliest versions of modern online banking replaced older programs accessible through desktop computers hooked up to a dial-up modem used in tandem with bank-provided floppy disks.

In the current climate, the expectation of convenience in an "always on" world requires online banking transactions to happen from anywhere, at any time. This is illustrated by a famous quote from Ross McEwan, CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland, when he called the 7:01 am Underground train between the Reading and Paddington stations, the bank's "busiest branch".

Improvements continue to expand in application services built as a mesh of micro-services. This architecture allows for greater control over both testing procedures and deployments through better leveraging and more consistent availability of all the various components. Even something as seemingly simple as depositing a check online, for example, is quite complex.

Service mesh technology has become increasingly popular among DevOps teams because of the flexibility it allows when working to maintain, build, and deploy apps within such complex workload environments. Results from a Voice of the Enterprise: DevOps, Workloads & Key Projects 2020 survey showed that 16% of respondents had adopted service mesh across their entire IT organizations and these numbers continue to grow as the complexities of hybrid-cloud operations demand more flexibility to manage.

The challenges of modern complexity within mobile banking transactions

All financial services enterprises, including banks born in the cloud as well as traditional banks, are going through waves of transformation. The challenge for financial enterprises is to continuously deliver fast, secure, and dependable apps. The pandemic has also drastically sped up the need for more available online banking options over the past few years. All of this massive complexity has moved beyond human scale to manage.

Let's revisit the specific example of online check deposit transaction technology. Everyone has probably noticed that it's not uncommon when depositing a check through your bank's phone app that the process sometimes doesn't work the first time, and an error is triggered somewhere along the path. When issues like this occur, IT teams need to quickly troubleshoot, and course correct the root cause of the problem. With basic monitoring, IT Admins might see where along the path the error occurred, but the error needs to be discovered and resolved quickly to avoid unwanted ramifications for your business. Full-stack observability offers a kind of X-ray vision for DevOps teams to see further into their technology stack to automatically solve problems, break down silos, and ensure customers have the best experiences.

Cisco solutions ensure application performance via high observability levels

Cisco realized there was a need for more holistic full stack observability of both on-premises infrastructures and multiple public cloud environments that are involved in application services management. IT teams must observe, orchestrate, collect, and analyze telemetry and data on a massive scale to consistently deliver the best user experiences.

The power of full-stack observability within Cisco solutions transforms siloed data into actionable insights and shareable context for your IT teams with the advanced capabilities of AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and Intersight allowing you to:

• Gain fast visibility into your entire hybrid-cloud application topology
• Receive actionable insights into your critical applications and services
• Automate workload placement and optimize application resources

What's to come

I frequently talk to customers to learn more about the specific challenges that go along with their ongoing technology transformations and about ways that Cisco, as a trusted technology innovator, continues to expand our offerings to best support and solve these challenges.

In my next blog in this industry vertical series, I will investigate more ways that Cisco solutions simplify hybrid cloud operations to help accelerate digital innovation for financial services enterprises. Stay tuned.

Resources

Did you miss it? Listen to the video replay of  Cisco hybrid cloud and cloud-native complexity simplified video on theCUBE channel for more details about how we use innovation to solve the biggest hybrid-cloud operational challenges across industries.

Read the recent blog by Dhritiman "DD" Dasgupta, Vice President of Product Management of the Cisco Cloud and Compute team, Cisco accelerates hybrid cloud operations with innovations from Intersight, Hyperflex, and UCS X-Series.