The report shows that 43% of organisations across all sectors have seen their business perform above or in line with expectations over the last year of business disruption. This rises to 46% in Financial Services and 49% in Insurance. Notably, while 9% of organizations across all sectors saw a decline in their business, it was only 5% in Financial Services, and 4% in Insurance.
Their resilience appears to be a result of the higher adoption of DevOps, which enables organizations to update and innovate their services and products faster to remain competitive and respond to the changing needs of their customers. While 74% of organizations across all sectors have now introduced DevOps, for example, this rises to 81% in Financial Services and 84% in Insurance. Only the Technology sector at 85% has seen a higher adoption rate.
Financial Services and Insurance companies are ahead of other sectors in their use of version control and automated builds, tests and deployments in application development. When it comes to database development, they are similarly taking the lead. Fifty-one percent of those in Financial Services and 52% of those in Insurance deploy database changes once a week or more frequently, compared to 47% across other sectors.
Financial Services and Insurance companies are also ahead of other sectors in including the database in their software development processes and releasing database changes alongside changes to applications. Fifty-one percent of those in Financial Services and 52% of those in Insurance deploy database changes once a week or more frequently, compared to 47% across other sectors.
Grant Fritchey, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Redgate Advocate, comments: “We’ve seen big changes in the financial sectors for a few years now, with new fintech entrants challenging the more established players. That’s prompted many to take advantage of practices like DevOps, and I think we’re seeing it reflected in the latest analysis from the Database DevOps report.”
The report does, however, highlight areas of concern. While they are deploying database changes more frequently, 73% in Financial Services and 74% in Insurance say that up to 10% of their deployments require hotfixes compared to 68% across other sectors.
Their move to the cloud is also slower. Across all sectors, 41% of organizations continue to host their servers either partly or wholly on-premises, but this rises to 49% in Financial Services, and 45% in Insurance. To counter this, 58% of those in Financial Services expect their cloud usage to increase over the next year, compared to 50% across all sectors, but it falls to 49% in Insurance.
A more detailed analysis and explanation of sector insights, which highlights the areas in DevOps where financial services businesses should focus their efforts is available in a new whitepaper at redgate.com/FinanceInsights.