FICO Uses AWS to Innovate Faster, Reduce Costs, and Expand Global Reach
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Who is using cloud computing?
Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications. For example, healthcare companies are using the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for patients. Financial services companies are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention. And video game makers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.
Benefits of cloud computing
Agility
The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.
You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform your business.
Elasticity
With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly to grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.
Cost savings
The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.
Deploy globally in minutes
With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.
Types of cloud computing
The three main types of cloud computing include Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Each type of cloud computing provides different levels of control, flexibility, and management so that you can select the right set of services for your needs.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT. It typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is most similar to the existing IT resources with which many IT departments and developers are familiar.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS removes the need for you to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems), and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS provides you with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to SaaS are referring to end-user applications (such as web-based email). With a SaaS offering, you don’t have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You only need to think about how you will use that particular software.
Speed and innovation are everything for FICO. The predictive-analytics and decision-management software company provides a popular credit-scoring service and other analytics software and tools to 95 percent of the largest U.S. financial institutions. To remain a leader in the industry, it must deliver rapidly deployed, cutting-edge solutions to its customers.
For many years, however, FICO lacked the agility to quickly develop and deploy its solutions, such as its flagship FICO Decision Management Suite (DMS). DMS helps customers drive business transformation through predictive analytics, business rules management, and optimization. “We were an on-premises software company for a long time, and it sometimes took years to create and deliver solutions to our customers,” says Joshua Prismon, vice president of product development at FICO. “We needed our customers to have faster time-to-market, and we wanted to focus on implementing our software instead of waiting for customers’ IT organizations to provision and build the underlying infrastructure for our solutions.”
To solve the problem and create more opportunity for innovation, FICO decided to move DMS and other solutions to the cloud. “We wanted to be more forward-thinking and bring more innovation to the marketplace, so we realized we needed to go all in on the cloud,” says Jeet Kaul, vice president of engineering at FICO. Before choosing a cloud provider, though, FICO wanted to make sure it would still be able to offer strong security and remain compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other regulations. Prismon says, “There are many business requirements for operating in the financial-services industry, so compliance had to be at the forefront of our cloud decision.”
Moving to a Serverless AWS Architecture
FICO chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider, in part because of the security capabilities integrated into AWS. Kaul states, “We needed a company that’s invested in financial-services companies and their compliance requirements, and AWS was ahead of the competition.” FICO was also interested in AWS Lambda, a service that provides serverless compute capabilities so customers can run code without the need to provision or manage servers. Prismon says, “We wanted to go serverless so our developers could focus more on creating features and functionality. AWS Lambda was the perfect solution because it provisions compute resources without our developers needing to enter code. That helps us concentrate solely on the application side of things.”
Unlocking Innovation
Because FICO uses AWS Lambda and other AWS services to manage compute instances, the company’s developers have more time to build new software and enhance DMS instead of provisioning and managing servers. “Because AWS Lambda does the provisioning automatically, we have completely unblocked the potential for our developers to innovate,” says Kaul.
“It’s easier for them to try new things and push the boundaries of application design.” Adds Prismon, “Our internal customers, including strategy analysts and data scientists, can now take an idea from inception to execution on our software without having to involve IT. They can deploy resources where and when they need them. This is possible because of the agility we get using AWS Lambda.”
Delivering Solutions in One Day Instead of Weeks
By providing DMS as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution on AWS, FICO can deliver new services and software features to customers faster. “We used to spend a lot of time in development, but things that used to take weeks to finish are now automated and can be done in a day because AWS Lambda takes care of everything and gives us so much flexibility,” says Prismon. “Now, we simply build something and deploy it. We no longer have to find out, for example, if our customers have multi-tenant architectures. Everything is addressed perfectly in AWS Lambda.”
Ensuring Compliance and Cutting Costs
FICO is meeting its stringent security and compliance requirements by running DMS on the AWS Cloud. “We have to be very careful about what code goes into production, so we use a managed software development lifecycle to ensure our financial data is in compliance,” says Prismon. “We can do that by using our own security tools along with AWS services to fully meet our regulatory requirements.”
