How Small Banks Can Safely Scale Salesforce Development
Expanding development processes can increase a small bank’s value to customers. Salesforce CI/CD tools are a critical aspect of safely increasing output without risking security issues.
Why It Matters: Without adequate safeguards, faulty code can be released into a live environment, creating data security vulnerabilities and compromising sensitive system data.
- Manual code reviews and integrations are error-prone and time-consuming, reducing your team’s productivity capabilities.
- Failing to properly protect sensitive data can lead to compliance failures and loss of consumer trust.
- Financial organizations are a major target for cybercrime—and this includes banks both large and small.
Here are eight things small banks can do to increase their release velocity and the overall productivity of their Salesforce DevOps team:
- Identify Your Goals and Produce a Road Map
- Prioritize Security + Compliance
- Support Collaboration with Version Control
- Automate as Much as Possible
- Implement Robust Testing Measures
- Employ Strategic Data Governance Protocols
- Encourage Continuous Learning
- Monitor Feedback and Remain Flexible
1. Identify Your Goals and Produce a Road Map
Having a clear idea of where you are going will reduce the time spent making decisions. Outline your goals for Salesforce DevOps implementation or expansion.
Utilizing Salesforce CI/CD tools or a new interface like nCino can go a long way toward expanding your DevOps team’s capacity for productivity.
As soon as your goals for improving customer service, streamlining operations, or enhancing reporting capabilities are set, you can put together a road map for achieving them.
2. Prioritize Security + Compliance
A major liability when introducing new processes and tools are potential cracks in your data security and compliance strategy. Security needs to remain front of mind when expanding services.
DevOps tools offer reporting capabilities that are critical to providing data in the case of a compliance audit.
Document everything and analyze these reports to find and fix potential data security liabilities.
3. Support Collaboration with Version Control
Adding developers to your team is a great way to increase productivity to meet expanded needs, but having new team members can lead to costly mistakes.
Implement version control so your team can easily roll back changes if overwrites or mistakes are entered into the main coding repository.
Having a clear history of changes makes it much easier for large development teams to work together, no matter where they are located.
4. Automate as Much as Possible
Manual processes are slow and error-prone. Small banks need to automate these processes if they want to maintain reliable updates while simultaneously increasing output.
Automating integration, deployment, and testing processes with tools like Salesforce CI/CD and static code analysis drastically expedites DevOps processes.
Taking these tasks off your team members’ hands frees them up to focus more deeply on innovation and creativity.
5. Implement Robust Testing Measures
Increasing your operations will require a series of new processes, applications, and updates to existing software. And if these updates aren’t reliable, you could be introducing costly vulnerabilities into your system.
Banks need to institute multiple layers of testing throughout the DevOps cycle to ensure nothing slips through the cracks to a live environment.
Bugs in a live environment can expose data, creating compliance failures and negating the benefits of scaling up operations.
6. Employ Strategic Data Governance Protocols
A strong system of protection and organization for system data reduces confusion among your team and makes it easier to protect critical information. This system needs to be in place before a small bank pursues a digital transformation.
Establish an intentional data governance strategy to ensure data pools contain up-to-date, reliable information for your team to use.
Check out this blog to learn more about getting the most from your data governance strategy.
7. Encourage Continuous Learning
Scaling operations means your team is going to work in ways it didn’t before. This is a process that should never stop.
Offer continuous training and encourage your team members to find new ways to grow in their roles.
Not only will this keep them engaged in their daily work, but it will also provide your bank new opportunities for innovation.
8. Monitor Feedback and Remain Flexible
Ideally, your bank will never stop growing. Your team is your greatest resource for identifying areas in need of improvement and ways to streamline existing processes.
Create a comfortable atmosphere for staff to voice their opinions. They are the ones with firsthand experience and direct knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.
Scaling Salesforce development relies heavily on two things: your team members and the tools they use. Trust your team to show you how you can make the next step toward achieving your goals.
Next Step…
Banks face some of the most stringent data security regulations because of the level of sensitivity associated with the type of information inherent to the industry. And when it comes to protecting sensitive data, data masking is an important tactic.
Check out our blog, 7 Best Practices for Secure Salesforce DevOps with Data Masking, to learn how to get the most from your data masking efforts.
FAQs
Where are the most common slowdowns in the DevOps pipeline?
Every phase of the DevOps pipeline has the potential to experience slowdowns. The planning stage can be delayed if the requirements for the project are unclear. The build and integration stages can be prolonged when issues arise with code quality, integration conflicts, or manual testing and deployment processes. Similarly, manual approval processes can lead to delays. And post-deployment activities can grind to a halt if bugs are identified or if the troubleshooting process runs into bottlenecks. Rework through error identification is a dramatic drag on productivity. Automation, better communication, and continuous improvement are crucial for optimizing the DevOps pipeline.
What benefits can small banks see from expanding DevOps processes?
An optimized DevOps pipeline enables small banks to be more flexible and agile in their response to data security threats and customer needs. Updates to existing systems are often required to patch flaws or tweak functionality. Quick and reliable development processes enable DevOps teams to quickly and adequately respond to these needs. Small banks often need to deliver their services with a small team. Having a more robust DevOps strategy allows these teams to drastically increase productivity to produce work at a rate that was previously impossible. The requests are never going to stop coming in. but putting in the time to create the necessary infrastructure to address changing requirements will make a much better working experience for your team members.
What do my developers need most to accomplish their goals?
Strategic automation and clear goals will drastically reduce wasted time and confusion for your developers. Eliminating down time lets them focus on productive tasks and get new updates and applications to market much faster. Automating lengthy review processes with Salesforce CI/CD tools and static code analysis eliminates slow, manual processes. Adopting clear communication and providing ample training not only align your team to approach their tasks in a unified way, but they also give them the authority to answer their own questions and stay productive. Combining these considerations with a well-structured data governance strategy ensures everyone knows where to find the information they need to accomplish their goals.
