Digital Banking Success Story – Barclays

Digital Banking Success Story – Barclays

Barclays stays ahead of the competition with Red Hat and DevOps.

Barclays, a global financial services provider based in London, faced increasing regulatory pressure and market demands—led by industry disruptor’s offering modern, digital services. Looking to increase innovation and productivity, Barclays set out to build an Application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) as part of its cloud programme. It used Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform and other Red Hat solutions to update its IT infrastructure and adopt an agile, DevOps approach to application development, giving its developers on-demand, self-service capabilities. As a result, the bank improved its efficiency and agility to innovate faster and stay competitive.

CHALLENGE:

Keep pace with market demands


Facing industry and competitive pressure, Barclay’s needed to create a more responsive business. Barclays sought to update both its IT environment and its culture, to take full advantage of the best tools and recruit the best banking talent.

SOLUTION:

Modernise technology and culture


Barclays adopted a DevOps approach where technical and business teams work together to quickly meet customer and market demands through continuous development.
As part of the bank’s cloud strategy, it chose to replace its traditional middleware for an on-premise aPaaS with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This solution provides its development teams with a more secure, consistent, and scalable platform for application development and hosting. The bank received on-site assistance from Red Hat to design and build the solution and train its teams.

RESULTS:

Support a cloud journey


With its new DevOps approach and aPaaS environ-ment, Barclays’ developers can work more efficiently to quickly release updates and features. Self-service capabilities have cut provisioning times from weeks to hours and freed up IT staff to work on new, valuable projects instead of routine tasks. These improvements have helped the bank’s internal users— in London and worldwide — work more effectively. Moving forward, the bank plans to move into public cloud computing and offer the same service across public and private clouds.

“Now, with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, we’re more agile,” said SIMON CASHMORE HEAD OF PaaS MIDDLEWARE ENGINEERING, BAR-CLAYS. “We can think of an idea, try it, fail, learn, and make adjustments. Culturally, that’s a big change.”

Improved developer efficiency for faster updates and feature releases

Cut provisioning times from weeks to hours with self-service capabilities

Freed staff to focus on strategic, valuable projects