5 Ways for Financial Services Organizations to Get the Most Bang for Their Buck at AWS re:Invent 2017
27 November – 1 December 2017, Las Vegas, NV
AWS’s annual flagship conference, AWS re:Invent, is drawing ever closer and this year looks set to be the biggest yet. Spread over six hotels, there’s a huge amount on offer in this year’s agenda - which can be daunting to the uninitiated attendee!
Contino is proud to be the sole sponsor of the Industry Day and Networking Reception for Financial Services on Monday 27 November and, in preparation, we’ve selected five of the choicest cuts from the Financial Services Track that we think financial services players will find most useful across a range of critical topics: transformation, security, compliance, grid compute and...beer/socialising!
Each entry has a link to the sessions we’ve recommended in the Event Catalogue, which you can find here and access with your event login.
Here we go!
1. Transformation
Simply buying tools like Puppet or Jenkins does not a DevOps capability make. It’s a truth self-evident that DevOps is more than about buying technology or standing up specialised teams. Change is required in an organization’s culture: in the people and processes core to their day-to-day work.
A large enterprise is just about the most challenging environment to achieve this - so the breakout session on How to Move a Global Financial Services Organization to a DevOps Operating Model is a critical one to attend:
Building a mature DevOps capability takes time. This session explores how banks can best use AWS to best bridge the gap between traditional operations and a DevOps model.
Recommended further reading: Ben Saunders’ Tried and Tested Techniques for Delivering Full Strategic Transformation
2. Security
Security should be the number one priority for FSI organizations...but so often we see it being tacked on at the end of key internal processes, rather than being considered upfront.
Typically, there’s a tension between the need to go fast in development teams to drive innovation, and the existential need to remain secure while doing it. Adopting a DevSecOps approach helps resolve this imbalance. By ‘shifting security left’ development teams can include security as early as possible in the software delivery pipeline and embed them in the very processes that they use to go faster.
To that end we’d recommend the following session:
FSV301 - Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid
In this session, AWS provide a guided tour of governance patterns to avoid – ones that may seem logical at first, but that actually impede your ability scale and realize business agility. They also cover best practices, such as setting up key preventative and detective controls for implementing 360-degrees of security coverage, practicing DevSecOps on a massive scale, and leveraging the AWS services (such as Amazon VPC, IAM, Amazon EMR, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Lambda) to meet the most strict and robust enterprise security requirements.
Recommended further reading: Richard Wadsworth’s How to Go Faster, Securely: The DevSecOps Paradox
3. Compliance
Regulatory compliance costs have doubled since the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act, climbing to 23% of total expenses!
With massive fines looming, and the need to keep innovating only growing, it has never been more important for organizations in the FSI vertical and has never been so burdensome to the enterprise to deliver.
We hold that automating regulatory and compliance requirements is the key to achieving this whilst ensuring organizations are nimble enough to innovate fast enough to maintain competitive advantage. We’re excited to see Contino customer Barclays CTO, Kieron Broadfoot, step up for the following session:
The session explores how Barclays realised a step change in providing autonomy to developers by automating the management of hundreds (and soon thousands) of AWS accounts. Attendees of this session will gain an understanding of the mindset, skillset, and toolset shifts that a diversified global financial institution must make to meet the control objectives of the present while ensuring the agility to accommodate technology change of the future.
Recommended further reading: for an example of these kind of practices in action, take a look at Contino Principal Dan Hurst’s video on Compliance as Code.
4. Grid Compute
Many financial services organizations have benefited from the use of grid computing over the years, but find it inadequate for the demands of today; with concerns over capacity planning, lack of scalability in existing grid architecture, and its inflexibility in the face of rapid regulatory change. This session will address with some practical advice how AWS can help close the gap:
FSV309 - Grid Computing for Financial Services
Heightened regulatory compliance requires more stress testing, and dynamic market conditions force organizations to increase speed to results. In response to these changes, financial services organizations are working with AWS to expand their on-premises grid-computing capabilities to the cloud and build cloud-native grids. Join AWS for an interactive whiteboarding session during which they discuss and compare different architectural designs for cloud-enabled grids. They also explore ways to take advantage of cloud-enabled benefits such as variable compute types, virtually unlimited compute and storage resources, and different pricing structures. Finally, they delve into specific financial services applications for cloud-enabled grids.
Recommended further reading: Watch Contino’s recorded Webinar to see how we move a trading app and all dev and test data from on-premises into AWS in under ten minutes.
5. Social
With an event as large as this, it’s important to stay hydrated! It’s also important to get the beers in. Make sure you grab a wristband and top up at the Financial Services Happy Hour!
It’ll be a great opportunity to network with hundreds of your peers and speakers from the day. Hope to see you there!
FSV01 - AWS Financial Services Happy Hour – Sponsored by Contino
That’s Your Lot!
Between those sessions and a few beers you should be well on the way to an awesome re:Invent 2017!
Book a Meeting with Us
Are you one of the 50,000 attendees? Hit the link below to book a meeting with one of our AWS-certified DevOps and cloud gurus, either during the Financial Services Industry Day or at any point during the event!
The Financial Services Industry Day will be full of break-out sessions including:
- Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid
- Best practice DevSecOps in Financial Services
- Leveraging AWS services to meet the strictest and most robust enterprise security requirements
- An Architecture for Trade Capture and Regulatory Reporting
- How to create a cost-effective trade capture and regulatory reporting solution
- Guidance for obtaining data-driven insights
- Bolstering encryption with AWS KMS
- Transparency with CloudWatch and CloudTrail
- Building Queryable Archives and Data Lakes for Financial Services
- Learn how to build a data lake that serves as the single source of data across your organization
- Making data easily accessible, enriching the data lake and gathering business insights
- Bringing the Brains Behind Alexa to Financial Services
- How to use AWS services to enhance omnichannel experiences
- How to create an AI-driven chatbot using AWS services for both internal and external customers
- Optimizing Payments Collections with Containers and Machine Learning
- How the Bank of Nova Scotia uses deep learning to manage payments collection and dramatically cuts costs versus on-premises
We’re happy to demonstrate Continuum, our automated framework for deploying an end-to-end CI/CD pipeline in AWS in under ten minutes, or Momentum, our battle-tested framework for large-scale enterprise DevOps and cloud adoption.
See you in Vegas!
