Originally reported by Help Net Security, based on research by Redgate.
Financial Services Firms Are Outpacing Other Sectors on DevOps
According to a report from Redgate, businesses in the financial services sector have pulled ahead of other industries — including government — when it comes to adopting DevOps practices. The driving forces are familiar: faster feature delivery, greater developer efficiency, and the need to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market. But the sector’s regulatory complexity and data privacy requirements make the journey more demanding than in most other verticals.
A Generative Culture at the Core
Kendra Little, Redgate DevOps Advocate and author of the report, points to cultural posture as the key differentiator:
“At the heart of what makes the financial services sector so interesting is its willingness to adopt a generative culture, which focuses on breaking free of siloes and promoting a proactive, collaborative atmosphere. It’s what makes DevOps adoption work so well. This is a far cry from the culture and structure we saw from respondents in other sectors, which were often marred by little to no cooperation, and an inability to adapt to change.”
— Kendra Little, Redgate DevOps Advocate
In DevOps literature, a “generative culture” — a term rooted in Ron Westrum’s organisational typology — describes an environment where information flows freely, failure is treated as an opportunity to learn, and cross-functional collaboration is the norm rather than the exception. Financial services firms, at least the leading ones, appear to be embodying this model more consistently than their peers in other industries.
Unique Pressures in Financial Services
The financial services sector faces a particularly demanding set of constraints that make DevOps adoption both more urgent and more complex:
- Customer expectations: End-users increasingly expect seamless digital experiences, new product features delivered quickly, and near-zero downtime.
- Regulatory compliance: Strict frameworks — including data protection regulations and financial industry standards — must be maintained throughout any modernisation effort.
- Data privacy: Handling sensitive financial data requires robust access controls and auditability, which must be preserved even as deployment pipelines are automated.
This combination of speed-driven demand and compliance-driven caution is exactly why database DevOps — not just application DevOps — becomes critical in this sector. Changes to database schemas and stored procedures carry significant risk and must be automated with care.
Key Findings From the Redgate Report
The report surfaces several metrics that illustrate how financial services firms compare to respondents across other sectors:
- 77% of financial services respondents have adopted DevOps across all or some projects, or have a proof-of-concept in place — compared to 69% across other sectors.
- 34% of financial services respondents cite increased speed of delivery as the biggest driver for automating database change delivery, versus 26% across other sectors.
- 66% of respondents believe the transition from traditional database development to a fully automated deployment process can be achieved in a year or less. That figure rises to 69% in the US and compares to 61% across other sectors.
- Financial services businesses are ahead of every other sector surveyed in adopting automation across the database development lifecycle.
- 54% of financial services businesses now deploy database changes daily, weekly, or on demand — compared to 49% across other sectors.
Leaders Are Surging Ahead — Laggards Risk Falling Behind
Little emphasises that the sector’s leading firms are not operating under easier conditions than their slower-moving peers — they face the same obstacles. The difference lies in how proactively those obstacles are addressed:
“What’s fascinating about the deeper sector analysis is the way businesses in financial services are innovating faster and further than any other sector. The data shows they face the same obstacles and challenges, but most are still surging ahead. Those who are lagging behind may need to revisit their digital transformation plans in order to remain competitive.”
— Kendra Little, Redgate DevOps Advocate
Common Hurdles That Still Remain
Despite overall sector leadership, the report acknowledges that significant challenges persist. Based on common patterns in financial services DevOps adoption, these typically include:
- Legacy systems: Many financial institutions run decades-old core banking systems that are difficult to integrate into modern CI/CD pipelines.
- Database automation gaps: Application deployment automation often matures faster than database change management, creating a bottleneck in the pipeline.
- Compliance and audit requirements: Automated pipelines must produce audit trails and maintain controls that satisfy regulators — adding complexity to pipeline design.
- Organisational silos: While leading firms have broken down silos, many institutions still operate with separate development, DBA, security, and operations teams that do not collaborate effectively.
- Talent and skills gaps: DevOps skills — particularly around database DevOps, security automation (DevSecOps), and platform engineering — remain in short supply.
What Financial Services Teams Should Take Away
For DevOps practitioners and engineering leaders working in or with financial services organisations, this data reinforces several practical priorities:
- Treat database changes as first-class citizens in your pipeline. Application CI/CD without database automation leaves a critical gap. Tools that version-control schema changes and automate deployments alongside application code are essential.
- Invest in cultural change alongside tooling. Technology alone does not produce DevOps outcomes. Cross-functional team structures, blameless post-mortems, and shared ownership of the delivery pipeline are non-negotiable.
- Build compliance into the pipeline, not around it. Automated policy checks, audit logging, and security scanning should be embedded in the CI/CD workflow rather than applied as manual gates after the fact.
- Benchmark your deployment frequency. The shift from quarterly or monthly releases to daily, weekly, or on-demand deployments is achievable within a year according to most survey respondents — but it requires deliberate planning and executive sponsorship.
- Reassess your digital transformation roadmap regularly. Firms that are not measuring their DevOps maturity against sector benchmarks risk losing ground to competitors who are.
This article is based on research published by Redgate and originally reported by Help Net Security in 2020. Specific survey methodology and sample size details were not available in the source material reviewed.