Financial services and insurance faring better than most in the pandemic year
While 2020 was one of the most challenging years for every business, those in financial services and insurance have fared better than most.
This is the conclusion of a deeper sector analysis of the data behind a Redgate’s report, which looked at the challenges and opportunities that more than 3,000 developers, database specialists and IT professionals experience when adopting DevOps for application and database development.
The report shows that 43% of organizations 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.
Resilience as a result of a higher adoption of DevOps
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 also 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.
Frequently deploying database changes
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.