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Solution Brief

IBM Financial Services Sector Financial Services

Cloud computing fornancial services:test and developmentin the Cloud

Brighter outlook, tighter reins

The nancial services industry has as many opportunities as it does

hurdles, being aced with exponential growth in the emerging markets,

shrinking operating margins, a tighter regulatory ramework, andemerging opportunities and competition rom new market entrants.

To tackle this complexitywhich almost 80 percent o industry CEOs

expect to grow signicantly over the next ve years 1banks will need

to nd new and more creative ways to increase their agility, eciency,

cost-eectiveness and responsiveness.

As an enabler o innovation and a catalyst or change, Cloud computing

promises to play a signicant role in banks eorts to reinvent their

business and operating models in the coming years. In technical terms,

a Cloud computing platorm automatically assembles, connects,

congures and recongures virtualized technology resources to

accomplish business goals. In business terms, it eliminates theconstraints o where physical IT resources are located or what specic

technologies they employ, enabling the rapid, low-cost ormulation and

deployment o new business services and new partnerships.

These attributes make it likely that test and development will be among

the rst workloads that nancial services companies will seek to move

to a Cloud computing environment. Test and development represents

a relatively low-risk workload or banks, while oering signicant

potential or rapid ROI.

Achieving greater efciency

As the pace o change in the market grows, nancial services companieswill need to move ever aster to deploy new products and services.

In a traditional environment, the development team will need to gain

budgetary approval or a new set o dedicated computing resources,

speciy and order them, await delivery, install and congure the

resources, and nally set up the required development environment.

In an already crowded data center that may be running out o available

electrical power and cooling capacity, it will be dicult and costly to set

up the new resources, and many studies have shown that they will likely

be under-utilized during their working lie.

Highlights

Signicantly increase speedand responsiveness in test

and development environments,

while reducing costs

Achieve faster time-to-market

and greater exibility 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.

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Copyright IBM Corporation 2010

IBM Financial Services SectorRoute 100Somers, NY 10589U.S.A.

Produced in the United States o AmericaOctober 2010All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, and ibm.com are trademarks or registeredtrademarks o International Business Machines Corporation in theUnited States, other countries, or both. I these and other IBMtrademarked terms are marked on their rst occurrence in thisinormation with a trademark symbol ( or ), these symbolsindicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM atthe time this inormation was published. Such trademarks may also beregistered or common law trademarks in other countries. A currentlist o IBM trademarks is available on the Web at Copyright andtrademark inormation at: ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.

Reerences in this publication to IBM products or services do notimply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in

which IBM operates.

1 Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights rom the Global ChieExecutive Ocer Study, Banking and Financial Markets IndustryExecutive Summary May 2010, IBM IBV

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Please Recycle

Similarly, or sotware testing, it may be necessary to order and

deploy new sets o resources to precisely mimic each ultimate

production environment, and it may not be easy to re-use them

or dierent requirements once the testing project is complete.

When test and development eorts 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 ar more ecient. With

a single set o completely virtualized resources, accessed via the

web, developers can meet new requirements by simply

speciying what they need. The provisioning element o the

Cloud platorm then instantly and automatically creates the

required virtual environmenttypically rom pre-built

templates representing various dierent nal production

environmentsand makes it ready or use. No waiting, no

redundancy, and no incremental capital expenditure or each

new requirement. When development or testing is complete,

the virtual environment is cleansed o all data and its resources

are returned to the common pool, ready or re-use.

Faster and more agile

Beyond eliminating cost, waste and delays in building out the

physical test and development inrastructure, the Cloud model

delivers even greater benets in terms o time-to-market and

fexibility. Test and development teams are no longer

constrained by their physical location, but can work on any

resources rom any location. New projects can be launched

within minutes, and teams have the fexibility to speciy the

precise environment they need.

By removing costs and delays rom test and developmentenvironments, the Cloud model can dramatically accelerate

time to market or the banks projects. Perhaps more

important, while signicantly reducing costs and speeding

time-to-value, adopting Cloud in their development

environments can acilitate more rapid and iterative

approaches, improving overall quality while supporting the

ability or 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 unctions, please contactyour IBM representative, or visit ibm.com/Cloud

Proven solutions from IBM

Aiming to be more client-ocused while reducing costs,

a major Dutch bank just successully piloted IBM Tivoli

Provisioning Manager to provision new cloud-based test and

development environments overnight. IT sta can now ocus

ully on serving the business, supporting aster time-to-value

or new initiatives.

Nissay IT, the IT service provider or one o the largest

lie insurers in Asia Pacic, worked with IBM to build acloud-based test and development solution, supporting the

rapid development o web systems. The IBM cloud cuts the

creation time or new environments rom months to hours,

helping reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent. It also improves

quality and drastically reduces time-to-market.

One o the big our state-owned commercial banks in China

accelerated the deployment o test and development

environments by automating previously manual processes

reducing the associated workload by 70 percent, and speeding

testing environment preparation rom 1-2 weeks to 2 hours.