As the world continues to shift towards digital transformation, BFS firms in India are increasingly relying on technology to provide seamless and efficient services to their customers. However, with increased reliance on technology, there comes a greater need for ensuring service reliability and minimizing downtime. This is where Service Reliability Engineering (SRE) comes into play. SRE is an approach that combines software engineering and operations to increase service reliability, reduce downtime, and improve user experience. SRE enables businesses to control expenses while ensuring that their systems are scalable, secure, and reliable.

According to a study by Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime for businesses is around $5,600 per minute. By implementing SRE and AIOps, banks can reduce downtime and prevent costly outages, potentially saving millions of dollars. Another report by McKinsey found that automation and AI can help banks reduce operational costs by 22% to 33% and estimated that the implementation of SRE principles and AIOPS platforms can lead to a 20-30% reduction in IT infrastructure costs for BFS institutions, resulting in savings of up to $1 billion per year for large banks.

In this case study, we take a closer look at how a leading BFS firm in India leveraged the ZIF ^TM SRE platform to overcome its service reliability challenges. With a wide network of interconnected offices and outreach programs across India, the firm faced challenges related to the high volume of alerts from their IT monitoring solution, reactive IT operations leading to unplanned downtime, and lack of visibility into user experience during application access and usage.

The ZIF^TM SRE platform offered a comprehensive solution to these challenges by proactively monitoring and managing incidents, integrating with DevOps processes, and automating incident response and remediation.

Client Overview

The client is a leading BFS company in India, with a history of over four decades in the industry. The company has a widespread network of over 500 interconnected offices across India, which ensures that customers have easy access to its services no matter where they are located. The client has also leveraged technology to make its services more accessible and convenient for customers, with its dedicated online platform. This platform enables customers to apply for loans, make payments, and manage their accounts from the comfort of their homes.

Client’s SRE Challenges

• Alerting: Alert fatigue from a high volume of IT monitoring alerts.

• Scalability: As the client continues to grow and expand their services, they need to ensure that their IT infrastructure and SRE capabilities can scale accordingly.

• Security and Compliance: The client needs to ensure the highest levels of security and compliance for all financial transactions and customer data. This includes safeguarding against cyber-attacks, protecting sensitive information, and meeting regulatory requirements.

• System availability and resilience: The client requires high system availability and resilience to ensure that financial transactions can be processed reliably and without interruption. This includes having robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place to minimize the impact of any disruptions.

• Legacy systems and technical debt: The client still rely on legacy systems that may not be compatible with modern SRE practices. This can create technical debt, making it difficult to implement new solutions or updates that may improve system reliability.

• Redundant tasks: Continual need for after-hours help for high-impact situations which can be automated has led to IT worker burnout

• Imbalance in Operations and Development Tasks: BFS operations can be complex, with multiple systems and processes involved in every transaction. This makes it difficult for the SRE team to concentrate on the development tasks.

• Unplanned Downtime: Due to the lack of proactive IT Operations, unplanned downtime occurs. Estimation of SLO and SLA also becomes difficult.

• Poor Incident Management: High number of critical incidents affects service reliability.

ZIF^TM SRE - Streamlining IT Operations with ZIF^TM

a. Solution Highlights

• Implementation of AIOps platform for Service Reliability Engineering (SRE) – ZIF^TM

• Removes the barriers between IT infrastructure systems and operations.

• ZIF^TM platform provides the SRE team with access to the latest CMDB and enables them to have complete Observability of the IT operations.

• The platform could enable the client to scale their IT infrastructure and SRE capabilities to support growth and change, while also providing the agility needed to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions.

• The platform provides capacity planning and optimization capabilities that enable IT staff to monitor and optimize system capacity to support business growth and changing demand.

• Continuous and real-time monitoring of infrastructure, applications, and user experience helps to achieve the targeted SLO and SLI.

• The event detection algorithm eliminates false positives and reduces alert fatigue

• Automatic Root cause analysis

• ZIF^TM automates routine IT tasks, reducing the burden on IT staff and minimizing the risk of human error. It eliminates the toil.

• The ZIF^TM platform could also enable proactive incident management, using predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to detect and prevent incidents before they occur. This would help to reduce unplanned downtime and minimize the impact of P1 incidents.

• The accurate event predictions help the client to estimate the Error-budget accurately.

b. Outcomes

• The Reduction in MTTR by 70%

• Reduction of high impact incidents by 25%

• Detection of 95% of high impact incidents in advance

• End-to-End visibility for the IT teams

• The platform helps to improve SLIs, such as availability and response time, by proactively monitoring and managing incidents.

• The implementation of the platform helps the client to reduce their error budget burn rate by proactively resolving incidents and staying within the error budget limits.

• Zero-touch automation for a variety of services, such as the delivery of cloud-native applications, legacy applications, and workflows

• IT resources and capacity freed up to prioritize key initiatives

• The implementation of the Zero Incident Framework helps the client to meet or exceed their service level agreements with customers, measured in terms of SLA compliance percentage or the number of SLA violations.

• By reducing unplanned downtime, reducing the strain on IT workers, and improving the utilization of IT resources, the Zero Incident Framework could result in cost savings, as measured by monetary savings, or return on investment (ROI)

The ZIF^TM SRE platform proactively monitors and manages incidents, integrating with DevOps processes, and increasing revenue for the bank by up to 30%. This is because DevOps enables banks to release new features and services faster, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. The 70% MTTR reduction resulted in an estimated cost savings of $4 million per year. By using SRE and AIOps, the client IT team was able to detect and resolve issues 90% faster, leading to approx. cost savings of $1.2 million per year. The client was able to improve their customer satisfaction ratings by 20% as well, which led to an estimated increase of $2 million in annual revenue. A 30% reduction in their operational costs was also observed, which resulted in savings of $3 million per year.

In conclusion, it can be said that SRE is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure for the BFS industry. The BFS sector deals with sensitive information and requires a high level of security and reliability. SRE practices help ensure that the BFS systems operate seamlessly without any disruptions or downtime, which is crucial for the industry’s smooth functioning. AIOPs platforms play a significant role in implementing SRE for BFS clients. Thus, the BFS industry should recognize the importance of SRE and AIOPs and invest in them to keep their IT infrastructure up to date and secure. As the world continues to rely more and more on technology, banks must keep pace with the changing times to stay competitive and serve their customers effectively!!