Sicoob is a credit unions organization from Brazil, consisting of 552 branch offices, 15 central agencies, 1 bank (Bancoob – Credit Union Bank of Brazil) and with approximately 2,000 Customer Service Points across the country. Sicoob administers an IT infrastructure consisting of high-end equipment, middle-range servers and mainframes. All of which are distributed in two proprietary Data Centers, following high quality standards and a set of hardware assets of high availability and performance, compatible with the for mission-critical business needs.
With the large volume of investments associated to the growth in recent years of the banking industry, Sicoob is being challenged more and more to properly plan its budgets, balancing efficiency and costumer experience through the services offered. Furthermore, the focus is less and less on operational issues and more in alignment with the business, glimpsing more strategic solutions.
In this context, the cloud computing model supports these strategic initiatives, being able to transform IT from its limited role known as a support provider to an active business role. At this point, the Gartner prediction starts to make sense when it says: "In 2021, cloud computing is simple computing, corporate offices are senior housing facilities and the IT organization of the future will be incorporated by the business. Internal IT will be an internal cloud. IT becomes service broker. IT will become a function of the business”.
Aligned to this reality, the inherent challenges of banking industry and the quest to become one of the leading institutions in Brazilian financial market, Sicoob is building a private cloud infrastructure to boost the industrialization of its IT services, using the newly adopted evolutionary process of consolidation and virtualization, with the objective to deliver the key benefits of cost reduction and business optimization.
The objective of this abstract is to present how Sicoob is considering the use the benefits obtained from a Cloud infrastructure to engage the industrialization of IT services, highlighting the aspects of architecture and methodology to achieve this goal.
Since 2012 Sicoob has gathered several analysts and specialists in solutions and architectures turned to industrialization and Cloud, including consultancies from IBM and the Gartner Group, with the objective of defining the key components for the Cooperative Cloud architecture model. To allow this definition, assessments were conducted including the areas of: business, infrastructure, development, financial, administrative, IT governance and security.
The architecture built for the Cooperative Cloud was based on the functional and non-functional necessities of the Sicoob industrialization and consisting, above all, by the main roles that shall interact in this new business model and by the following architectural elements contemplated in one common management platform: IT Infrastructure and Governance, Continuous Delivery of Software and the Administrative Management and Control Area.
This platform presents a set of operational and business management focused on services. The operational, organized by the elements: Infrastructure and IT Governance, as well as Continuous Delivery of Software. Where both of these represent a set of operational management that are necessary to implement a Cloud service, where many of these management domains already exist on the traditional Sicoob Data Centers management model, while other domains are new and very specific for the degree of automation and efficiency associated to Cloud. The aspect of business, relative to the element Area of Administrative Management and Control, have to do with the set of services related to business that are necessary for the implementation of Cloud service.
On this architecture, stands the existing integration between the elements the have to do with the Infrastructure and IT Governance, as well as the Continuous Delivery of Software, that permit a reduction in the cycle time of software and service delivery and consequently less time-to-market, together with the increase in the quality of deliverables. This integration is accomplished through the use of continuous delivery models and DevOps, comprehended by the following macro activities: continuous end-to-end deliveries, integrating tools and processes related to the development and operation solutions - DevOps; automated provisioning and delivery of pre-defined environments, and incremental adoption of solutions that extends the capabilities of DevOps (e.g., performance monitoring and test management).
After the definition of the architecture, new assessments were made, with the use of tools like ITScore from Gartner and frameworks from ITIL, with the finality of evaluating the actual level of maturity of the organization facing the necessary objectives to reach a level of continuous delivery of the IT services. As result, it was identified that the organization found themselves at an intermediate level of maturity, although with some deficiencies on the processes that it composes.
Afterwards, a roadmap of the Sicoob IT industrialization was established, with the necessary goals for delivering standardized, automated, replicable, scalable and trustworthy solutions that covers all layers of the value chain of the IT services: infrastructure, applications and business processes.
Once these goals were defined, strategies were established and necessary actions for acquisitions and process improvements will guide the efforts and investments for industrialization to be incorporated into the organization IT Strategic Planning.
Initiatives planned for 2013 budget include the delivery of new services and business trends, such as: VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), social business solutions, DMS (Document Management System), internal solutions to deliver services from a standard catalog of services, automation for the provisioning for virtual servers, acquisition of a unique IT service management tool, centralized configuration of application servers and improving existing processes.
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