Transcript
Hello, everybody. Thank you for tuning in, to this webinar, rethink your Salesforce releases in financial services. In this session, myself and my colleague Claudia, will be taking you through why and how you can rethink your Salesforce releases, as it pertains to the financial services industry.
So my name is Jack McCurdy. I am DevOps advocate here at Gearset. Over the last three years or so, I've been spending the bulk of that time working with Salesforce teams of all shapes and sizes.
First and foremost, take the pin out of their deployment processes and then help them build a proper DevOps practice, for Salesforce that they can use in their organizations to really transform their Salesforce delivery.
About a year of my time here, I spent specifically working with enterprise financial services organizations and banking and insurance mainly to overcome the unique challenges of adopting DevOps best practices in what is a highly regulated industry with stringent compliance requirements and all, the challenges that that can pose to us. So we did an annual survey, the state of Salesforce DevOps twenty twenty two. And what we looked at is how teams are performing, the challenges that they face, and how DevOps affects their return on investment on Salesforce and the trends that we can expect to see over the next year.
What it's done is it has highlighted some key insights that are really useful for financial services companies, how your companies differ to other industries, whether that's for better or for worse, and insights that are relevant to the challenges that you face. And today, I'm gonna be taking you through five key stats and what they really tell us. And then on the back of those, Claudia here is gonna run through five actionable tips. So we'll hear a little bit more about Claudia later.
Like I mentioned already, we've got some time for questions at the end. So if you do have any questions, please feel free to pop those questions, into the q and a answer answer sheet or in the chat, if that's more convenient for you.
So let's give you a little bit of scope of the survey, first and foremost, run through some of the industries, countries, and company sizes that we've been working with here.
So we had over a thousand Salesforce professionals take part from every major industry and sector.
Fourteen percent of those that did take the survey did work in financial services, which is the second largest group after the tech sector, for those that a category didn't fit. So, an awesome set of, results that we have here that we can draw a lot of insight from.
And then what we also had was representation from, folks in financial services from across the globe as well, which does reflect that global presence that Salesforce has, which is awesome to see there.
And then finally, there's a good spread in terms of the company sizes, that we had responses from as well. Folks in small fintech start ups, giant insurance companies, and everywhere in between all took the survey. And that gives us a really nice representative dataset with from which we've drawn the insight today, that will hopefully be really valuable.
Before I jump into those five key results that I was talking to you about, just a moment ago, let's stop and think a little bit about the return on investment the financial services companies are getting from Salesforce DevOps.
A phenomenal eighty four percent of financial services companies that adopted DevOps did increase their return on investment, which is an awesome, awesome figure, that we can read that means we can really stand behind Salesforce DevOps as a worthwhile investment. So, that statistic is consistently high, across, across all industries that we work with, but financial services companies are really starting to feel that benefit.
And thirty nine percent of those companies in total estimated that their ROI from DevOps is more than ten thousand dollars a month based on factors such as time saved, business improvements, and things like that. So if we take, for example, Billy, who are a financial technology company, as an example, they reduced their typical Salesforce release times from five hours to forty minutes, with an efficient DevOps process, using Gearset. So those time savings really add up. And this is great to see as there's always room for growth as well. So something, that we covered today will hopefully allow you to achieve, that ROI yourselves or further boost it.
So let's get into the key results and what they really mean. So I'm gonna cover deployment time, lead time, backup frequency, data loss, and challenges, in twenty twenty two from that report.
Firstly, deployment times. So deployment success is the foundation of DevOps success. Deployment speed and success are linked when your deployments work first time. You don't have to waste time redeploying, working out conflicts, and that means that you're gonna be deploying faster.
And then forty three percent of financial services Salesforce teams now say that they usually deploy between environments within an hour, which is a phenomenal statistic. There's no there's there's no beating around the bush. It is awesome, which is slightly above the average across all other industries. So a big check-in the box there. And an additional thirty five percent of teams in, financial services usually take between one and four hours. So some interesting insight there. And, if you compare yourself to those, it'd be really interesting, to know where you sit.
People in financial services tell us that enterprise agility. So as an organized organization's ability to quickly and comfortably adapt to changing business conditions is absolutely a top priority.
So faster deployments make it possible to release more often, which tightens the feedback loop. So your end users, get to shape the direction of travel a lot easier.
So, another example here, Celent, the financial services research and advisory firm, says that the opportunities for financial services companies to try agile methods is opening up as legacy systems are being replaced as well. So, we have a real window of opportunity, that we can, start to leverage here as those, as those services, dip out and make way for, make way for innovation. And agile teams can increase their product development speed and decision efficiency by five times. So reducing deployment times should absolutely be a focus, of your team.
Now Gartner found that financial services companies are having to adapt to keep up with customers' changing needs. So in fact, seventy four percent of business leaders in financial services say that keeping up with the customer's changing needs is a current or six month priority. And the customer experience is key. So faster deployments for regular advancements of that functionality is essential to keep the end users happy. So teams with deployments taking longer than five hours, they're really struggling to be agile, so really need to focus on reducing their deployment time significantly.
So time saved on deployments spent better building business solutions, that are gonna move the needle, for commercial growth and your end user satisfaction there.
Next, we've got lead times. So lead times are what your end users and product owners really care about. You know? So how long do they have to wait for a feature from the point that they request it to the point that it's in their hands?
That is to say if, of course, the feature that they want is something viable and is gonna be delivered. So most teams have a lead time of between a week and a month. While seventy percent of financial services companies manage to keep lead times under a month, this is slightly behind, others in this area. So there is room for improvement to match other industries, and those lead times correlate with the speed of innovation.
End users are careful despite the lead times because that's when they see and experience the new product, the new feature, or the improvements to their Salesforce org. And Gartner reported that the digital gap in financial services industry widened in the month following the onset of the COVID nineteen pandemic.
For some companies, digital transformation is well underway, and they have the agility to respond quickly to any given opportunity or crisis.
But the companies that lag behind now will get even further behind unless they begin to adopt the technologies that accelerate delivery.
Extended lead times, that indicates slower innovation.
It's a sign that larger projects aren't being delivered in manageable slices. We're also familiar with significantly large projects being delivered in the financial services space, and a fantastic way to increase that speed of innovation is to deliver those in manageable slices, which is another key attribute of high performing DevOps teams. So if your team is taking over a month to deliver, that's gonna be having a significant knock on effect to your innovation.
Something that we have here in terms of your backup frequency as well, we we found that some teams are still lacking a robust backup solution. So forty five percent of financial services companies back up their org daily or multiple times a day, and sixteen percent of those do it weekly.
But worryingly, there's sixteen percent of companies that only back up on an ad hoc basis. So who knows how often that really happens, if at all. And the frightening statistic is that twelve percent never back up their orgs.
And that twelve percent of companies is in line with under industries, but what's really worrying and it's quite surprising, given financial services companies are generally more risk averse, we're really having we're really having a false sense security with our backups and our delivery processes.
And twenty three percent of teams just export that data, from Salesforce. So probably have that false sense security with no real plan about how they would go about getting their data back into Salesforce, never mind, if it's backed up in the first place. And doing it manually just isn't feasible.
So this means that the majority of teams aren't really prepared for data loss, and they don't have a tried and tested restore plan ready either. So in such a highly regulated industry where trust means an incredible amount, that is absolutely astonishing.
So data loss has the potential for irretrievable loss of customer trust, and you may incur hefty fines for that as well, especially for banks that have come eve under even more scrutiny since the two thousand and seven financial crisis that led to the Dodd Frank Act for those in the US.
There are various parties calling for greater federal regulation of insurance companies, especially with AIG having played a major role in the crisis. And according to Forrester, the highest priority technology initiative for financial services is increasing security and privacy capabilities.
So data and metadata backup should be at the front line and are an easy way to increase that security and, therefore, your trust, that the customers will have in you should something go wrong. As you would expect, elite teams have automated backups as part of their release process, although that should be standard practice for all teams no matter their maturity levels. Elite teams are also really well equipped and confident to restore fast too.
So carrying on on that track, many teams don't take backing up seriously because they think data loss will never happen to them. And that's a sentiment, we hear at GearSat again and again. It may be that they're misinformed and think manual exports or the idea of the cloud, that is to say, or Salesforce backs everything up for them.
At time when insurance companies are taking on more risk, it's important to minimize it wherever possible. Unfortunately, data metadata loss can and it does happen to any team of any shape of any size. In fact, fraud and data breaches reached an all time high in twenty twenty one. Banks are rightly worried about the security and the integrity of customer interactions, which is forcing them to move cautiously according to Forrester.
Having said that, Financed services suffer on average fewer data or metadata losses, than when it comes to Salesforce than other industries.
Only thirty five percent, compared to the average of forty five percent, possibly due to that more cautious behavior that I've been mentioning.
But that's still one third of financial services companies suffering data or messages loss every year. And, of course, having a backup in place will mean that you can rest assured and that you can rescue a hundred percent of your data and mess data and that you can do so quickly with minimal impact to your business continuity, which is really, really, really important.
We've gone on here, and to final finalize the points on, on our backup, data and metadata loss incident really can be catastrophic.
Although forty two percent were able to restore in less than a day, almost a quarter of those took weeks or even months. So it's important to remember that not only the actual time it takes to restore all your orgs, but the time that there is the the time that it there is and that it takes, to realize that there has been a data lost and then investigate the cause, and the full extent of the damage, is there as well. So time to restore is a key metric for accessing your resilience. It demonstrates the ability to recover quickly from anything that corrupts or damages your org and is absolutely another mark of one of those elite DevOps teams that we work with.
So how you back up your data also matters for compliance, encryption, monitoring, the ability to remove someone's records from backups are all essential as well. So something that needs to be taken into consideration as you think about those two. As open finance becomes a reality, giving customers three hundred and sixty degree view of their financial life, compliance will no doubt be front of mind. And Forrester has noted that if done poorly, financial services companies face a huge bill to satisfy customers and chronic regulatory oversight.
We find that forty four percent of Salesforce teams in financial services say increased demand is the biggest challenge they face in twenty twenty two. So to deal with these demands and other challenges, companies are prioritizing training, upskilling, improving their processes, and working more collaboratively.
The landscape in financial services has never been so competitive. Gartner recommends focusing your organization's culture on innovation and adaptability.
For example, adopt agile methodologies and a learn fast mindset, scale projects at the enterprise level, and focus on talent upskilling through hiring and training programs.
Finding ways to work faster and smarter at scale is critical to meeting your growing demand.
So I've given you a bit of insight there and, some of the figures that we found, through the state of Salesforce DevOps report twenty twenty two, and, hopefully, that insight has been interesting. And I'm gonna pass over to Claudia now who is going to share some top tips with us. So, Claudia, over to you.
You are on mute, I think.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Jack, and sorry for being on mute. That's really exciting, and thank you so much for sharing all that information with us. That's really, really interesting.
So to introduce myself, I'm Claudia MacPhail. I'm one of the sales engineers here at Gearset. I've started my career in customer support. I now partner with our customers to provide in-depth technical support and consultation to elevate their Salesforce DevOps practice and deliver on their Salesforce investment, worked with several, various financial institutions, and I'm really excited to share with you today five actionable tips that I'd recommend, for yourselves as part of that industry.
To help you get the most out of these key insights Jack has talked through, I have got five key tips to take away and to action.
And the first of these is this.
The first thing that you should do is to first of all start with an assessment. You need to assess and fix a basic deployment process.
If your team is one that takes more than five hours to deploy between orgs then you need to assess and review this process that is taking you so long.
You need to stop deploying natively with tools like changesets, they're notoriously inefficient and slow.
Great deployments are fast, they work the first time, they avoid deployment errors and they don't require manual tracking of changes. They're also robust, they don't ship bugs, they're easy to roll back and to keep track of, this is the kind of change that you want to be making.
If that doesn't sound like your deployments, now is a good time to assess how your team deploys Salesforce metadata.
Ask yourself these three questions: Can our team see exactly what's deploying?
Is it easy to compare the differences between source and target?
Are we alerted to common errors like missing dependencies in a deployment package to help make sure the deployment succeeds?
Finally, can we see a full deployment history for team wide visibility and an audit trail?
Steve Burton, the VP of Digital Customer Experience and Marketing at Legal and General America asked these same questions.
He takes pride in his team's ability to support the wider business and had a mission to evolve the DevOps process to enable agility across the enterprise.
Many elements of their new process including the ability to package, validate and schedule overnight, use Gearset.
This has meant the Salesforce team can now support their business very well. They're much more agile than they were before and can quickly and comfortably change with the business.
You need to build your DevOps strategy from the ground up and efficient deployments are the foundation of that.
If your deployments are a bottleneck you won't be able to adopt more complex DevOps processes like version control or CICD, particularly as your orgs grow in size and complexity.
Seventy percent of financial services companies manage to keep lead times under a month, so even being with the chance to compete against other banks and insurance companies you need to build functionality that's driven by your users' needs.
Development and customisation work must be well tested and driven by the precise needs of the end users.
To make user driven deployment a reality you need to tighten feedback loops, releasing small chunks of work one at a time with a fast turnaround.
That way users can test customisation work and give feedback to you faster.
For example, you should be testing your code at the earliest possible stage using something like PMD analysis to check for publicly exposed information or details within your Apex code.
A virtuous cycle is then created where improvements are continually added and tested on a rolling basis.
Basis. As Jack has said previously, the financial services sector is unsurprisingly one of the most highly regulated of all industries. It is also increasingly the one with the highest public profile. There have been a fair few scandals related to technology within the financial services industry, we don't want to be caught within that net.
Don't make the mistake of thinking your data is secure even if it's quote unquote in the cloud, you still need a backup solution.
Salesforce releasing their backup and restore tools demonstrates that even Salesforce does agree that you need a backup.
But backup and restore is a new lightweight product on the same platform that it backs up. You may be familiar with the Salesforce incident in twenty nineteen dubbed 'Permageddon', where past and present users of Pardot, the marketing automation tool acquired by Salesforce, found that their permissions model had been corrupted. All user profiles had been granted sysadmin permissions to view and modify all data.
Salesforce pulled all affected instances offline, leaving users without access and then deleted all the affected permissions.
While this prevented any and all users from being able to access data, Salesforce admins and developers then had to restore their orgs profiles and permissions, or if they had no viable backups rebuild them manually.
So you need a mature external product that backs up both data and metadata and can be used to restore quickly.
The only way to find out is to explore the options.
You'll need to create a restore plan so that your team knows exactly what to do in a crisis and essentially test your restore process, I cannot emphasise that enough.
It's good practice to test your restore process in a sandbox environment and set up a regular testing cadence for your restore process at least once a year.
You should make sure that everyone is familiar with the restore process, particularly if your Salesforce teams grows or changes.
And finally, think about any backup simply as part of your DevOps solution.
With Gearset, your backup and release processes are tightly integrated and all controlled from the same familiar UI, and this familiarity speeds up the recovery time. You can also run backups while on demand within the UI before a risky release, so that the latest data is secure if anything goes wrong.
One third of Financial Services Salesforce teams suffer a data or metadata loss incident each year.
With this in mind, you should look into tightening things up this year.
There are a few steps you can take to make sure your company's data is secure and practices are compliant.
As already mentioned, having a solid backup and restore plan in place is crucial for maintaining the security of your org. Likewise, version control and automated testing bring security benefits of reducing the likelihood that any damaging or dangerous changes are released into production.
Testing with realistic data is invaluable, as it lets you see how your new feature will handle realistic quirks and edge cases.
But testing with live production data has obvious security and compliance issues, risking exposure, sensitive data or personally identifiable information, or accidentally even emailing someone as part of testing and email integration.
Make sure you mask your production data when you load it into your testing environment so you have the benefit of safety and security as well as that robust testing.
You also get an added layer of security with monitoring tools which give you the visibility of what changes have been made to your org.
Monitoring lets you account for everything in an audit trail and remove problematic changes quickly.
You can also set up Smart Alerts with some tools, like Gearset, to notify you of large data changes, such as a large solution of datasets so you can stay on top of a potential security incident.
Due to the nature of data and metadata, Sage uses for their accounting, payroll and HR software they come under serious scrutiny.
For Chris Deutschman, a Configuration Consultant at Sage, the monitoring alerts is a favourite feature of his, which he says enables visibility and brings more discipline to the team.
Chris has found that about one out of ten times he looks at the alert, he picks up an unexpected change, so the monitoring is extremely useful to him.
Although most of these changes prove to be harmless, if Chris didn't receive his daily monitoring email, he knows it would take longer for them to pick up where there is a potential issue.
If you take a look at our DevSecOps ebook, created with our partners at Silverline CRM, there is more information on this very topic.
The last tip is this, to overcome challenges this year, most Salesforce teams in financial services will be focusing on training and upskilling, improved processes, and working more collaboratively.
The cultural shift required for effective DevOps can be a big blocker to some teams. Persistent older workflows and silos can hold teams back despite the best of intentions of managers and team members to implement DevOps practices.
There's a spectrum of technical backgrounds on most Salesforce teams. At one end, you've got the administrator backgrounds, you live by clicks not code, and at the other end you've got the more traditional pro code developers.
This often leads to a separation within teams where different folks have different approaches to creating changes.
They have different requirements for tooling and different levels of familiarity with the DevOps process.
Developers are often more comfortable using CLI and tools like Versus Code and work with with Git on a day to day basis.
Salesforce admins are typically less familiar with this tooling and prefer having a GUI based functionality to push through changes.
So having a process and a toolset that both admins and developers can work with, while being able to choose where they are working is critical to successful coordination across the team and an efficient release process.
To help with this choose tools and workflows that are inclusive of all working styles.
Everyone needs to be able to work together using their preferred low code or pro code ways of working.
You also need to make sure that your entire team understands how both the process should be followed and why. Implementing DevOps Gradually can help with this. By taking on new tools and process and improvements one by one, you'll help the whole team to understand the value of each element in the process, which helps get buy in. It also helps the team get used to the idea of ongoing improvements to the workflow.
We'll make sure to send you the summary infographic of everything that we've covered today, and we'd also encourage you to download the full report on our website which covers all these industries. And of course you can always get in touch with us to book a free one on one consultation with a GISA expert to discuss your current practices, and would you like to improve in how GISA can help with our actionable pieces.
We'd like now to open up the floor to any questions.
Thanks, Claudia. That was really helpful.
If anybody has any questions, now would be an awesome time, to drop them into the q and a. We've got a few minutes here before, before the end of the webinar, is due to finish. So you can pop those in there. Happy to answer.
Hi, Jack. It's Liz. We've had a few questions into the panelists.
So I was just gonna fire them off to you. I hope that's okay.
That's fine.
So the first one is, how do we get started?
That is a that is a great question.
So getting started on getting started with improving your your DevOps DevOps process is is simple.
It's basically, it's simple. It start starts with contacting some experts. So, Claudia has mentioned there already that we are happy to have to chat to anybody, about their DevOps processes, where they're currently sitting, and, what they are looking to achieve, to to get themselves started.
You know, that's always what we do here at Gearset.
The consultation is free. No obligation, if you're looking to get started. The the key thing is is that you do get started. I think the key thing that we've talked about a lot today is security and resilience and that side of things. So, in terms of getting started, you need to be speaking to somebody, that can help with that backup disaster recovery and that side of things. To that end, if you're looking to do something at the minimum for your metadata, if you don't already do it, then moving to version control is an excellent place to start, with getting metadata backups into version control. So there's a there's a number of methods there, but, each company, even Infinato Services, is gonna have slightly different requirements.
So, come and speak come and speak to some experts, and we'll help guide you on that right path.
And just quickly, a question.
How does Gearset work with CICD tools with Azure DevOps?
Claudia, I'm gonna throw that one over to you.
I have to answer this one. So, Gearset is fully compatible with, Azure DevOps. I guess I would want to get some clarification. Sorry. I'm always like so I always want clarification.
On when you say CICD tools with Azure DevOps, are you talking about maybe Azure pipelines that are already embedded within Azure itself? Are we talking about maybe a Jenkins server that is connected to your Azure process, all of which we can work with, but it would be good to know in order to give you a more specific answer. The short answer is that GIS will support you in setting up a complete end to end DevOps pipeline, which is underpinned with your DevOps, you know, sorry, with your source control provider of choice, whether that be Azure or something else like GitHub or Bitbucket. And we will also integrate fully with your Azure work items process as well. So if you have changes you'd like to move and also link them back to an Azure work item ticket, then we will support you in doing that and allow you to integrate that into your overall DevOps process.
Thanks, Claudia. And another question. Does the gear set code run adjacent to Salesforce in the cloud, or does it need to be housed on physical servers that the customer owns?
Yep. Happy to answer that one as well. And Jack can obviously chip in as well. So Gearset doesn't need to be hosted on any physical services that the customer owns.
We're very purposefully built, off platform of Salesforce and on AWS. We are a web based application, so we will be connected to you directly via an OAuth connection to your Salesforce organisations. There's nothing for you to download, install, patch, upgrade, anything like that. We practice what we preach when it comes to DevOps.
We're continually iterating and improving on Gearset. It's not something you're going to have to dread and worry about updating three times a year.
Thanks. There's no more questions.
Well, that takes us a minute over time, Liz. Thanks for, sending those questions over to us. Claudia, thank you so much, for your time and your tips and your insight there, and thank you everybody for tuning in. And we hope to speak to, some of you or all of you again, sometime in the near future. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much.
