Global Bank Partners With PagerDuty to Migrate to the Cloud

This global banking company focuses on serving low-income customers and families whose needs are often turned away by mainstream banks. The company’s mission is to help people achieve their financial goals by providing credit card and loan services to over 2 million customers.

The bank’s Senior Technology Operations Manager oversees different teams inside the organization including application support, infrastructure, and platform. These teams ensure the organization’s systems and services are always online and available around the clock. Traditionally, this company prioritized its products around in-person banking services, but with an increased demand for digital-first service offerings over the last few years, it shifted its focus towards revamping its website and mobile app to fully support a completely digital customer experience. “We want to put our technology in the hands of our customers and allow them to choose the channel they want to use while interacting with our services,” explained the Senior Technology Operations Manager.

Challenges of Digital Transformation

The organization’s digital transformation began in 2016 when the mobile team pivoted to focus more on digital services. Teams felt that the mobile app needed a new user interface that put the company’s services in the palms of customers’ hands, rather than traveling to the bank every time they needed to use a service.

Prior to 2016, a third-party vendor developed and hosted the bank’s mobile services, but since few customers were actually using the mobile app, the team instead decided to create a new one in-house. With a goal of getting this new app in the hands of customers as fast as possible, the team decided to build and host the application completely in the cloud, allowing service provisioning to go from weeks to hours and saving several months of development time. Due to the success of the mobile app, the company now hosts all new services in the cloud.

Today, the mobile team is now responsible for monitoring and supporting these new cloud-hosted services around the clock. Previously, the company had a team dedicated to troubleshooting incidents, which mainly involved a service desk following runbooks and using other, more manual escalation processes. But due to the nature of the organization’s mobile app now needing 24/7 support, the mobile team needed a new process to provide support after normal business hours.

With the new mobile app, the bank realized they needed to address additional challenges, including:

• Manual incident response. Using a service desk, incidents needed to be monitored, acknowledged, and escalated manually.
• Lack of visibility. Without an incident management platform, a record of incidents was not easily accessible.
• Difficulty providing 24/7 support. Creating in-house digital services meant that customers now required 24/7 support from internal teams.

“Our services require 24/7 support and this simply wasn’t manageable with a manual incident response process,” explained the Senior Technology Operations Manager. “Basically, we’re offering a real-time service (with regard to the mobile app), and we need to be able to support it in real time.”

Automating Incident Response With PagerDuty

Instead of having a centralized team dedicated to monitoring the global banking company’s services and alerting responders when incidents happened, the mobile team turned to PagerDuty to help distribute these responsibilities across the organization. Adopting PagerDuty allowed the organization to expand ownership and visibility to all employees responsible for services they built, rather than making the service desk responsible. The mobile team was able to quickly integrate the PagerDuty platform with tools such as SolarWinds for on-premises monitoring, as well as Microsoft Azure and Datadog for cloud monitoring. “The ambiguity that PagerDuty’s integrations offer helped us move to an automated incident management process for both our on-prem and cloud services,” explained the Senior Technology Operations Manager.

After implementing PagerDuty, the mobile team immediately saw the impact of having an end-to-end digital operations platform. “We had an instance where one of our file shares was getting consumed rapidly and was going to reach capacity,” the Senior Technology Operations Manager shared. “With several services impacted, the service desk was notified about the incident by different teams, but my team had already acknowledged, escalated, and resolved the incident before it ever became customer-facing. That was the moment we saw the true value of PagerDuty.”

As the mobile team shifted from relying on one centralized team to monitor, assign, and escalate issues to a more automated incident management process, other teams inside of the organization began adopting the PagerDuty platform. Now, the core infrastructure and the loan services teams have integrated PagerDuty into their incident management workflows. A Core Infrastructure Engineer shared that, “It’s been difficult shifting away from a manual process, but when we saw the success that the mobile team had, we decided to implement PagerDuty into the core infrastructure team as well.”

Teams using PagerDuty have seen many benefits, including:

• Faster response times. PagerDuty’s mobile app allows teams to triage incidents anywhere and anytime.
• More automation. Incidents can be automatically closed and logged into the organization’s configuration management system.
• Increased visibility. Teams have been able to keep a record of its incidents to analyze new data.

“With PagerDuty, we can proactively resolve incidents before they become customer-facing,” explained a Senior Technology Operations Manager.

What’s Next?

Looking forward, the global bank wants to continue shifting its internal culture by embracing automated workflows across more teams. For example, using the PagerDuty mobile app, the executive team now has real-time visibility into incidents occurring throughout different teams and services, and will begin to use this information to continue fine-tuning the incident management process at the organization. Additionally, teams are evaluating other PagerDuty products to see how real-time data can provide deep contextual insights and further boost their team’s productivity.

“PagerDuty allows us to have that single-pane-of-glass, holistic view of the health of all our services,” shared the Senior Technology Operations Manager.

To learn more about how PagerDuty is helping companies transform their digital operations, visit www.pagerduty.com/customers for more information and start a 14-day free trial today.