Organisations making extensive use of digital tools have to work continually to boost their adaptative capacity: a necessity to meet the client demands but also to face increasingly tough competitive pressure. Service offerings should continuously evolve to meet these challenges. Time-to-market has to be cut to a minimum, as each new functionality is rolled out. “To achieve this, our clients seek to automate operational processes linked to the development, deployment and use of IT applications,” explains Yuri Colombi, Head of Solutions & Innovation at EBRC. “We want to support our clients in their process of adopting a DevOps approach, using our Trusted Cloud Europe platform hosted in Luxembourg.”
A containerisation platform for greater agility
With this in mind, EBRC has implemented its new Kubernetes as a Service offering. This is a unique containerisation platform, hosted and managed from EBRC infrastructure in Luxembourg. It enables organisations to manage their applications from their development to the go-live, all within EBRC’s secure environment. No call to the IT resource manager is required. “Our teams have been working on this service since 2017, with the goal of meeting the needs of Luxembourg’s financial players, energy companies, health services providers and more," adds Yuri Colombi.
“Many of these activities are highly regulated and should meet the highest levels of data securi ty, as well as meeting unique market challenges. In this framework, local data hosting is usually a vital component." EBRC was therefore keen to give these clients a maximum flexibility, while enabling them to meet supervisory requirements easily. "Thus, we give our clients a single locally-based managed platform to deploy applications with speed and flexibility, without them having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Either with an on-premise solutions (in EBRC’s Data Centers) or on hyper clouds such as Microsoft Azure or AWS," says Yuri Colombi.
Guaranteed transparency and security
The platform is based on open-source technology, a de facto standard, thus guaranteeing the highest level of transparency for all users. It also gives real independence in the management and deployment of the application environment. “We work to make our clients as autonomous as possible," says Yuri Colombi. “We ensure that the platform is available at any time, enabling the client to use it as it wishes. As part of this on-going work, we ensure it incorporates the latest developments by Kubernetes and its associated eco-system.” For example, we are working on a new service which will automatically check each deployed container before it goes into production, thus ensuring there are no vulnerabilities," explains EBRC's Head of Solutions & Innovation. “This creates real added value, based on our security and business continuity expertise, without creating additional burdens on the client’s deployment process. In addition, throughout the platform, the user has access to numerous indicators relating to the availability, performance and use of the various applications.”
Finologee: now in full autonomy
Finologee, a fintech that enables financial sector players to move to open banking, was one of the first users of this platform. "To help us grow we equipped ourselves with an ecosystem of tools which automates many stages of our development as well as implementing numerous control functions. This encompasses everything from writing a new line of code to putting into production a new version of an application," explains Georges Berscheid, the CTO of Finologee. “Using containerisation technology through Kubernetes allows us to develop quickly without making us dependent on a particular service provider.”
For Finologee – and especially for their clients – it was important its solutions to be able to run from a Luxembourg-based, PSF compliant environment. "EBRC's hybrid platform is open to the public cloud, thus it enables us to develop and test our applications in that environment, while maintaining a hyper-secure production environment that complies with the financial sector regulatory requirements. These are the key advantages of EBRC's Trusted Cloud Europe," explains Georges Berscheid. “As all of this operates in an integrated and transparent way, our containers can be quickly moved from a public model to private production via EBRC's hybrid cloud service.”