How a Global Financial Services Company Scaled Governance in the Enterprise

The Challenge: Managing Governance

The global financial services company had a governance challenge. To solve it, they needed a ready-to-use solution. And it needed to integrate with IBM WebSphere DataPower.

Key Requirements

The global financial services company had some key requirements:

• Allow staff to plan, design, develop, deploy, and then manage business critical IT services in the infrastructure.
• Require the proper tools, workflows, and automated integration in every stage of the lifecycle.
• Ensure that services are operational on the DataPower platform.
• Reduce the complexity of governing the large set of interconnected technology components.
• Simplify the environment through a product suite built from the ground up for governance automation.
• Focus more on strategic initiatives. Spend less time on post-install product integration and process streamlining initiatives.

Their goal? To deliver the IT services needed to reduce cost, improve growth, lower risk, and increase profitability.

They found the right solution with Akana. 

The Solution: Akana

The global financial services company chose Akana as their full lifecycle API management solution because they needed to go beyond API basics.

With Akana, they gained:

• The ability to plan, design, develop, deploy, and manage IT services.
• The right tools, workflows, and automation for every stage of the lifecycle.
• An integration with IBM WebSphere DataPower.
• Simplified management of components.
• End-to-end governance.

Today, the customer depends on Akana for planning, development, and operational governance. This ensures that every step in the governance lifecycle is supported.

The Result: Efficiency and Speed

Akana helped the global financial services company:

• Gain efficiency.
• Accelerate time to market.
• Ensure accuracy.
• Increase operational effectiveness.

Here's how they did it.

The global financial services company used Akana to integrate a wide variety of backend systems. These included:

• IBM CICS- and IMS-based mainframes.
• IBM DB2 and other critical databases.
• Application servers such as IBM WebSphere Application Server.
• The Microsoft.NET platform.

Akana integrated with DataPower automated service deployment. And it delivered built-in monitoring. This includes centralized alerting, transaction auditing, and graphical views. It even delivered real-time metrics from DataPower appliances.

It also offers advanced DataPower clustering features. So, they can automatically manage pools of DataPower appliances. And it's just as easy as managing a single appliance.

The integrated solution also enables the customer to author a wide variety of policies in Akana. Plus, these policies can be deployed directly to DataPower appliances. And it's in an entirely automated and agile manner.

The result? DataPower can enforce a large set of policies. This allows the customer to use DataPower for a wide range of security, auditing, routing, and backend integration use cases.

Lessons Learned With IBM WebSphere DataPower

The customer had challenging requirements with IBM WebSphere DataPower. Here's what they learned in the process.

Lesson 1: Use DataPower as Core Runtime Platform

They needed an effective governance solution. And they wanted minimal customization or integration once the core product suite was installed.

Lesson 2: Choose Ready-to-Use Governance

A “ready-to-use” governance solution provides easy-to-author centralized policy.

Lesson 3: Automate Deployment

They wanted automated deployment of services and policy to DataPower. This enables a highly agile and robust infrastructure. So, the customer could maximize their investment in DataPower’s rich feature set. At the same time, there's less complexity.

Lesson 4: Cover End-to-End Governance

An end-to-end governance solution was critical to success. This enables the global financial services company to respond to the needs of the business in a timely, robust, and cost effective manner.

Why Akana?

Akana provides a complete governance framework for the enterprise.

That's because Akana handles governance from end-to-end, including:

• Planning governance: Enables you to build the right services at the right time.
• Lifecycle governance: Ensures consistency in management of assets across all development environments.
• Policy governance: Automates governance processes. Governance isn't a painful workload — it's a productivity tool.
• Operational governance: Monitors usage, performance, and policy compliance metrics. So, you can ensure security and reliability.

Be Like the Global Financial Services Company

Gain efficiency. Accelerate time-to-market. Ensure accuracy. Increase operational efficiency. Just like the global financial services company did. 

See for yourself how Akana can help you. Sign up to find out if you qualify for a 6-month free trial and start gaining your competitive edge today.

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