How to Apply Governance in the Cloud Without Compromising Flexibility

It’s a familiar story. Handcuffed to a complex technology ecosystem and facing increasingly stringent governance requirements, a decades-old financial enterprise is struggling to get its products to market fast enough.

Since the dawn of the digital age, this exact scenario has played out for insurance industry institutions like Lincoln Financial Group. In need of a serious upgrade to its software delivery practice, the 113-year old Lincoln Financial turned to the cloud to bring some innovation and flexibility to its diverse and massive application portfolio. But they quickly found out that the migration would only be half the battle.

In a recent webinar, Luke Jamroz, AVP of Hosting, Middleware, and Enterprise Services at Lincoln Financial, discussed how the Fortune 250 company overhauled its software delivery ecosystem and is successfully using the cloud to achieve both speed and flexibility in a highly regulated industry.

You can watch the complete webinar here, or check out a breakdown of Jamroz’s presentation below.

Flexibility, Speed, Control

There’s no exact blueprint that applies to every organization for providing cloud services, or to every team, for that matter. To stay flexible, Lincoln Financial must give its developers instant access to the cloud-based tools they need. But they also must ensure that the same governance and security guardrails that are applied when running on-premise tools are also in place with the cloud services. To do so, Jamroz and the IT Infrastructure Team at Lincoln Financial turned to the AWS Service Catalog––a platform that enables organizations to manage the use of approved AWS services. The development teams at Lincoln Financial can now quickly deploy, test, and experiment with new AWS services and features, with the assurance that the mitigating factors to reduce risk are locked in. For Lincoln Financial, the AWS Service Catalog has been a gateway to AWS services. “It allows you to create standardized infrastructure deployments, which means that you effectively create a homogeneous environment for operational support. So, AWS Service Catalog will enable those policies and governance controls for access, for sharing, reuse, and control,” Jamroz noted during the webinar. “It also delivers corporate governance and control as well as organizational scalability through self-service to the end user.” Jamroz and the IT Infrastructure Team are able to provide repeatable, on-demand processes for their development teams to launch services on AWS on demand, without sacrificing control.

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Learn more

• How a Release Chain of Custody Secures the Software Delivery Process
• AWS Service Catalog and XebiaLabs: Curated Cloud Resources Integrated into the DevOps Pipeline
• Accelerate DevOps Transformation with App Migration to the Cloud
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