IBM Financial Services Sector
Solution Brief
Highlights
• Significantly increase speed
and responsiveness in test
and development environments,
while reducing costs
• Achieve faster time-to-market
and greater flexibility for new
products and services
• Simplify global development efforts
with a single environment for all
developers, regardless of their location
• Eliminate the high cost and long
lead-times associated with
procuring physical servers for new
test environments
• Enable the creation of standard
virtual templates to further
accelerate the deployment of new
test and development environments.
Financial Services
Cloud computing for
financial services:
test and development
in the Cloud
Brighter outlook, tighter reins
The financial services industry has as many opportunities as it does
hurdles, being faced with exponential growth in the emerging markets,
shrinking operating margins, a tighter regulatory framework, and
emerging opportunities and competition from new market entrants.
To tackle this complexity—which almost 80 percent of industry CEOs
expect to grow significantly over the next five years1—banks will need
to find new and more creative ways to increase their agility, efficiency,
cost-effectiveness and responsiveness.
As an enabler of innovation and a catalyst for change, Cloud computing
promises to play a significant role in banks’ efforts to reinvent their
business and operating models in the coming years. In technical terms,
a Cloud computing platform automatically assembles, connects,
configures and reconfigures virtualized technology resources to
accomplish business goals. In business terms, it eliminates the
constraints of where physical IT resources are located or what specific
technologies they employ, enabling the rapid, low-cost formulation and
deployment of new business services and new partnerships.
These attributes make it likely that test and development will be among
the first workloads that financial services companies will seek to move
to a Cloud computing environment. Test and development represents
a relatively low-risk workload for banks, while offering significant
potential for rapid ROI.
Achieving greater efficiency
As the pace of change in the market grows, financial services companies
will need to move ever faster to deploy new products and services.
In a traditional environment, the development team will need to gain
budgetary approval for a new set of dedicated computing resources,
specify and order them, await delivery, install and configure the
resources, and finally set up the required development environment.
In an already crowded data center that may be running out of available
electrical power and cooling capacity, it will be difficult and costly to set
up the new resources, and many studies have shown that they will likely
be under-utilized during their working life.

Similarly, for software testing, it may be necessary to order and
deploy new sets of resources to precisely mimic each ultimate
production environment, and it may not be easy to re-use them
for different requirements once the testing project is complete.
When test and development efforts span multiple cities or
countries, it is likely that there will be even greater redundancy
and duplication, representing wasted capital and operational
expenditure.
Test and development in the Cloud is far more efficient. With
a single set of completely virtualized resources, accessed via the
web, developers can meet new requirements by simply
specifying what they need. The provisioning element of the
Cloud platform then instantly and automatically creates the
required virtual environment—typically from pre-built
templates representing various different final production
environments—and makes it ready for use. No waiting, no
redundancy, and no incremental capital expenditure for each
new requirement. When development or testing is complete,
the virtual environment is cleansed of all data and its resources
are returned to the common pool, ready for re-use.
Faster and more agile
Beyond eliminating cost, waste and delays in building out the
physical test and development infrastructure, the Cloud model
delivers even greater benefits in terms of time-to-market and
flexibility. Test and development teams are no longer
constrained by their physical location, but can work on any
resources from any location. New projects can be launched
within minutes, and teams have the flexibility to specify the
precise environment they need.
By removing costs and delays from test and development
environments, the Cloud model can dramatically accelerate
time to market for the bank’s projects. Perhaps more
important, while significantly reducing costs and speeding
time‑to‑value, adopting Cloud in their development
environments can facilitate more rapid and iterative
approaches, improving overall quality while supporting the
ability for banks to innovate and tackle the growing complexity
in their chosen markets.
For more information
To learn more about the advantages Cloud computing can
bring to your test and development functions, please contact
your IBM representative, or visit ibm.com/Cloud
Proven solutions from IBM
Aiming to be more client-focused while reducing costs,
a major Dutch bank just successfully piloted IBM Tivoli
Provisioning Manager to provision new cloud-based test and
development environments overnight. IT staff can now focus
fully on serving the business, supporting faster time-to-value
for new initiatives.
Nissay IT, the IT service provider for one of the largest
life insurers in Asia Pacific, worked with IBM to build a
cloud‑based test and development solution, supporting the
rapid development of web systems. The IBM cloud cuts the
creation time for new environments from months to hours,
helping reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent. It also improves
quality and drastically reduces time-to-market.
One of the big four state-owned commercial banks in China
accelerated the deployment of test and development
environments by automating previously manual processes—
reducing the associated workload by 70 percent, and speeding
testing environment preparation from 1-2 weeks to 2 hours.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2010
IBM Financial Services Sector
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Produced in the United States of America
October 2010
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1
Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief
Executive Officer Study, Banking and Financial Markets Industry
Executive Summary May 2010, IBM IBV
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