Test Lab Modernization Trends for Financial Enterprises
Financial enterprises face pressure to test more complex systems, faster than ever, while facing multiple regulatory compliance requirements that must be fulfilled multiple times per year. For many, their current state of testing simply can’t keep up. To address these challenges, a test lab modernization and automation strategy is key to meeting objectives and requirements in the financial sector.
In widespread discussions with financial enterprises about their test labs, several recurring challenges consistently emerge. Many organizations manage multiple labs or environments that are segmented by technology or vendor, often resulting in silos across both customer premises and vendor facilities. These fragmented setups hinder collaboration and scalability. Testing services are commonly sourced from vendors through annual contracts for a pool of resources, often delivered on a best-effort basis with limited guarantees of performance or timeliness.
In addition, typical lab setup times can stretch into weeks, requiring the coordination of multiple lab technicians. In some cases, labs are intentionally kept static to reduce setup time, but this approach significantly limits flexibility and adaptability. Testing cycles themselves are long, running several months with manual report generation, and critically, there is no integration testing performed across environments. This leads to issues surfacing in production environments that were not tested due to the siloed nature of lab operations — significantly increasing incident risk and costs. Furthermore, impairment testing is minimal, and never conducted in an integrated fashion. The result is lengthy timelines for new feature testing — often taking 9 to 12 months to fully develop test plans and execute testing — while redundancies and duplication persist due to overlapping tools and processes across disparate labs.
Regulatory compliance requirements for financial enterprises
Financial enterprises are being continually pushed to test more complex systems, faster than ever before, while trying to reduce costs and carbon footprint. On top of that, they all face multiple regulatory compliance requirements, many that must be fulfilled multiple times per year. For many, their current state of testing simply can’t keep up. Their unique requirements include:
Timely compliance
- Keep pace with new regulatory and technology requirements, often multiple times per year.
- Provide technology and expertise to deliver rapid, comprehensive, and cost-effective testing.
- Ensure in-code compliance to minimize incidents and fortify service-level agreements (SLAs).
Consumer duty
- Account for customer accessibility, needs, and demands.
- Foster interaction channels (i.e., socio-economic status, geography, special needs, satisfaction, etc.).
Data integrity
- Confirm SLAs are achievable in the lab under real-world loads.
- Identify application weaknesses and foster improvements for high performance during periods of high latency.
Security assurance
- Fortify controls over the use of data; ensure equivalency of PII data and monetary value.
- Mitigate risk by identifying vulnerabilities and suggesting code-level remediation.
- Ensure SWIFT network architecture and web applications facilitate access and enforce procedures for transfers.
Drivers for lab and test modernization in financial enterprises
Objectives voiced by a wide range of financial enterprises include the incorporation of automated Infrastructure as Code (IaC) along with these requirements:
- Compliance: Ensure in-code compliance to reduce incidents and meet regulatory certification requirements.
- Savings: Realize measurable lab setup and test savings with clear return on investment (ROI) analysis and a typical 12–24 month payback period.
- Productivity: Achieve up to 90x productivity gains by accelerating task durations from weeks to hours and enabling faster feature testing.
- Collaboration: Enhance collaboration with cross-departmental integration testing and secure, global 24x7x365 access to shared lab environments.
Prime objectives of test lab modernization
To address the drivers above, and to achieve optimal productivity in testing, a test lab modernization solution for financial enterprises should abstract physical, virtual, and hybrid lab resources (that may be geographically dispersed) with systems and processes to provide a “federated lab” with access for each test team. Through their solution interface, each test team should be able to reserve lab resources, build templates to define required test topologies, and trigger the fully automated build of any test topology. Teams should have their own lab in a designated timeslot, which can be rapidly reconfigured at will.
Sample Current State Test Lab (top) and Future State (bottom)
The interface should also provide a centralized development environment. This allows test teams to build automated test suites, and the controls to execute them, with results populated into a centralized reporting engine that tracks testing progress against their plan. Diverse global test teams from different organizations should possess a comprehensive platform to automate the testing in their continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD)process that is fully compatible with in-house or third-party automation tools.
Learn how Keysight Network Testing for Financial Services solutions can help financial enterprises realize their testing objectives and requirements in the financial sector.