What banks need to know about observability

By Abdi Essa, Regional Vice President, UK&I, Dynatrace

More aspects of our everyday lives are taking place online – from how we work, to how we socialise and, crucially, how we bank. To keep pace, financial organisations have stepped up their digital transformation efforts, supported by a shift to dynamic multicloud environments and cloud-native architectures. However, traditional monitoring solutions and manual approaches cannot keep up with these vast, highly complex environments. As a result, many banks are turning to new, observability-based approaches to understand what is happening in their digital ecosystems. These approaches, however, bring new challenges to overcome.

Here are six things banks need to know about observability to ensure they can gain true value, combat the complexities of their modern multicloud environments, and drive digital success in 2021 and beyond.

1. Most banks have very limited observability

The scale, complexity, and constant change that characterises hybrid, multicloud environments presents a real challenge to banks’ IT teams. Our research found that, on average, banking digital teams have full observability into just 11 percent of their application and infrastructure environments – not nearly enough to understand what is happening, and why, across the digital ecosystem. Additionally, 87 percent said there are barriers preventing them from monitoring a greater proportion of their applications – including limited time and resources. Without improving observability across the entire cloud environment – by drawing in metrics, logs, and traces from every application – banks’ IT teams are limited in the success they can have driving initiatives to deliver the new banking products and quality user experience customers want.

2. You can’t bank on manual approaches

With many banks beginning to rely on more dynamic, distributed multicloud architectures to deliver new services, IT teams are stretched further than ever. More than a third of financial services organisations say their IT environment changes at least once per second, and 65 percent say it changes every minute or less. This rate of change creates a volume, velocity, and variety of data that has gone beyond banks’ IT teams’ ability to handle with traditional approaches – there’s no time to manually script, configure, and instrument observability and set up monitoring capabilities. The need for automation is therefore critical. By harnessing continuous automation assisted by AI in place of manual processes, teams can drastically improve observability to automatically discover, instrument, and baseline every component in their bank’s cloud ecosystem as it changes, in real-time.

3. Cloud native adoption is obfuscating observability

To remain agile and keep up with the rapid pace of digital transformation, banks are increasingly turning to cloud-native architectures. Our research found 81 percent of them are using cloud-native technologies and platforms such as Kubernetes, microservices and containers. However, the complexity of managing these ecosystems has made it even harder for banks’ IT teams to maintain observability across their environments. Nearly three-quarters of banking CIOs say the rise of Kubernetes has resulted in too many moving parts for IT to manage, and that a radically different approach to IT and cloud operations management is needed. Such an approach should be based on a solution that is purpose-built to auto-discover and scale with cloud-native architectures.

4. Data silos result in tunnel vision

To boost observability, many banks have simply thrown more tools at the problem. Our research found that most organisations use an average of 11 monitoring solutions across the technology stack. However, more isn’t always better, and multiple sources of monitoring data can result in fragmented insights. This fragmentation makes it harder to understand the full context of the impact that digital service performance has on user experience and unravel the nearly infinite web of interdependencies between banks’ applications, clouds, and infrastructure. Instead, financial organisations should seek a single platform with a unified data model to unlock a single source of truth. This will be integral to ensuring that all digital teams are on the same page, speaking the same language, and collaborating effectively across silos to achieve business goals.

5. Observability alone is not enough

Simply having observability doesn’t help banks achieve tangible benefits or reach their business goals. To get true value, the data processed must be actionable in real-time. As such, observability is most effective when paired with AI and automation. This observability enables teams to instantly eliminate false positives, prioritise problems based on the impact it will have on the wider organisation, and understand the root cause of any problems or anomalies so they can resolve them quickly. The alternative is to manually trawl through dashboards and data to find insights, which is incredibly time-consuming and makes it almost impossible to act in real-time. Our research found that 94 percent of CIOs think AI-assistance will be critical to IT’s ability to cope with increasing workloads and deliver maximum value to the organisation. AI is clearly no longer just a ‘nice to have,’ but a business imperative.

6. Observability isn’t just for the back end

Far from just having observability of their multicloud environments, banking IT teams also need to be able to see how the code they push into production impacts the end-user experience, and how that in turn affects outcomes for the business. This is a major goal for many CIOs, with 58 percent citing the ability to be more proactive and continuously optimise user experience as a benefit they hoped to achieve from increased use of automation in cloud and IT operations. By harnessing automatic and intelligent observability, banks’ digital teams can unlock code-level insights and precise answers to their questions about user experience and behaviour, so they can continuously optimise their banking services.

Observability is key for modern financial organisations looking to accelerate their digital transformation. By understanding these six key things about observability, IT teams will be better placed to master dynamic, multicloud ecosystems, and drive better digital banking services for the business and its customers.