At least 7 new things as you "Simplify IT"

 As we prepare the agenda for the Asian Financial Services Congress 2020 #afsc2020 we recognize a growing mantra across the industry: to make IT simple.

What does this mean? The most appealing way to simplify (and also modernize financial services technology) is: to refactor legacy systems using micro-services and APIs. Hopefully, banks and insurers will be able to transform their lumbering legacy systems to an agile, Fintech-like modular, cloud ready architecture. In other words: trade in slow, mammoth architectures with lightweight and fast architectures worthy of our times.

This great simplification of usability of microservices belies a great effort in managing complexity. In other words, simplifying IT is NOT that simple.

The new challenges like in the orchestration of the API and microservices environment – particularly when it comes to development, testing, and deployment of Agile practices. Some things to add to the agenda:

• Building easily usable and discoverable APIs and micro services on top of core legacy systems, which deliver one functionality well and are singular – no other API or micro service duplicates this functionality.
• Applications now need to not only be cloud-native (but also mobile-first). This requires new, lightweight, modular applications platforms that can accommodate new microservice-based and mobile applications.  
• Old-school ESBs need to evolve to lightweight, embeddable, API-based integration that use de facto industry standard integration patterns to ensure rapid, repeatable integration.
• Infrastructure and storage must seamlessly span physical, virtual, public and private cloud environments.
• The point of building microservice applications is to make them easy to be deployed and reused using containers. Moving forward, a key thing: container management platforms and toolkits.
• As financial institutions deploy and manage vast numbers of containers across a hybrid infrastructure, DevOps processes will be crucial.
• Of course, security and governance to address questions around securing data in an open world and controlling partners coming in through the API gateways.

 All these things introduce a new set of challenges that lead us to say that although the industry simplifies technology, in reality, it needs to be good at in doing a lot more, and newer things in IT.