The financial industry, especially banks, are still using a programming language that is over 50 years old. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are out of date, rather these giant institutions have found in some cases that their ancient systems just work. They are stable and secure software programs. But databases are not like static source code; they are always moving and changing. With the most important client information sitting in the database, it’s no surprise that banks and other financial institutions lead all other industries in adoption of Continuous Delivery methodologies for the database.
A recent survey we conducted revealed that the banking and finance industry DBAs far outpace non-financial companies in terms of database Continuous Delivery adoption. Of the 55% of respondents not in the finance space practicing Continuous Delivery, only 49% said they practiced CD on their databases. When we asked banking and finance DBAs and managers, we found that over 70% utilize database automation for software and 64% of those also practiced CD for the database.
These institutions are required to be agile in their database methodologies due to having such a large number of applications to deal with on a daily basis. Moreover, database errors that cause downtime are incredibly costly and financial institutions cannot afford to have any. Aside from the peace of mind that your database can run itself and adapt on the fly, proper database automation and version control can save financial institutions 80%-95% of time it would normally take to manually process changes and there is clear ROI when implementing Continuous Delivery.
The economic effects of unplanned outages are prohibitive. According to a report by Gartner research, unplanned outages, on average, cost $42K per hour. When it comes to financial services companies, research shows the cost are much higher at about $110K per hour, the bigger the footprint that a company has, the more money it will lose when it fails.
These statistics are one of the main reasons that we’re starting to see mainstream adoption of Agile and DevOps practices in finance companies. DevOps favors automating as many processes as possible and automation removes the potential for human error. By automating our processes, we allow machines to handle the redundant tasks freeing up the time and resources of skilled database professionals for more valuable and cost effective responsibilities.
DevOps for Database, automation, control and enforced change management, provide confidence in the integrity and quality of the database code and virtually eliminates the potential that harmful database changes will find their way into production.
About the Author/ Yaniv Yehuda
Yaniv Yehuda, CTO, DBmaestro (http://www.dbmaestro.com/)
Yaniv is the Co-Founder and CTO of DBmaestro, the leading provider of DevOps for Database solutions which enable control of database development and deployment. Yaniv is also the Co-Founder and the head of development for the Extreme group, a leading IT services solutions provider group.
