Chef for Financial Services

Many Financial Services organizations have fully embraced the acceleration of application development by adopting agile principles and modern software engineering practices. Yet the number of Financial Services organizations that apply this thinking to managing IT infrastructure remains limited. Requests for infrastructure typically still go through an assembly line process that includes many handoffs, long delays and often misconfigurations.

High performing Financial Institutions have taken a novel approach and adopted Infrastructure as code, or the process of managing, provisioning, and deploying necessary infrastructure resources as code. These IT resources can be as bare-metal, VMs or hybrid cloud instances.

Chef has helped financial services organizations define infrastructure as code, ensuring that configuration policies are flexible, versionable, testable and especially simple as they are human readable. IT resources that are managed by Chef are continuously evaluated against a predefined desired state, which ensures that configuration drifts are automatically corrected and when necessary configuration changes can be universally and efficiently applied.

Financial Services organizations are part of heavily regulated industries in their own right such as banking, insurance, and wealth management. Regulatory, industry, or own corporate compliance standards are varied, diverse and complex to say the least so streamlined and automating these processes can be difficult.

The current regulatory state of affairs requires Financial Services organizations to provide documented and comprehensive audit of the state of compliance of their systems. Only by taking a continuous compliance approach against compliance and security rules expressed as code will financial institutions be able detect noncompliance, identify and prioritize issues, then quickly apply remediation across the entire fleet.

Chef has assisted financial services organizations from across the globe, through Chef Compliance, to gain greater control over the detection, correction and automation of security and compliance issues.

With financial services organizations being subject to regulations such as FFIEC, PCI-DSS, FFIEC, and GDPR, managing compliance is a complex and dynamic process with a lot of moving parts. Between the myriad of international, federal, state, and local laws, industry-specific regulations, and company-specific requirements, achieving compliance in a robust financial regulatory environment can be challenging.

Chef has helped financial service institutions by delivering consistent and scalable ways to maintain and enforce compliance across their organizations.This is especially true when it comes to time-consuming and inefficient audits that divert valuable engineering resources.