On November 6, local time in the United States, after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a series of upgrades, fee reductions and other operations at the company's first developer conference, domestic and foreign software and hardware manufacturers, including IT and Xinchuang, were boiling. The banking technology staff who always pay attention to the frontier of science and technology and keep up with the hot spots of artificial intelligence large model application are also excited.
In recent years, new technologies, including artificial intelligence, have been iteratively updated more rapidly, which has been profoundly affecting banks' IT architecture and business systems, and the underlying support services, including cloud computing, have been continuously enriched and improved to meet the needs of banks' digital transformation in the new era. Similarly, the financial cloud is also focusing on upgrading and optimizing service capabilities to impress bank customers.
Cao Zhen, product manager of Qingyun Technology, said that at present, new and old technologies are updated and iterative, including banks, and all industries involved in digital transformation need to grasp at least three directions:
The first is artificial intelligence. Due to the continuous breakthroughs in machine Xi, deep learning Xi and natural language processing, artificial intelligence has been widely used in various fields. Whether it is intelligent voice assistants, autonomous driving, or smart homes, the development of artificial intelligence is constantly promoting the update of technology and the development of society.
The second is cloud native. After continuous upgrading, the cloud-native technology has developed into a mature software development and deployment methodology. The purpose is to make full use of the advantages of cloud computing, so that applications have the characteristics of high scalability, high flexibility, and high reliability. It emphasizes designing applications as microservices architectures, deploying them using containerization technologies, and automating them for management and operations.
Finally, there is Xinchuang. Core technology cannot be controlled by others, and needs to be firmly in the hands of one's own country. As a result, the domestic information and innovation transformation project of the independent and controllable route, especially in the banking industry, is in full swing, and cloud computing happens to be an important part of information technology.
Up or down to the cloud?In fact, financial information innovation can save more money
As the financial cloud strives to seek a new industry upswing with the help of artificial intelligence, the voice of going to the cloud is beginning to appear. Recently, Elon Musk made a "crazy" move by moving his work from the cloud to Twitter's own servers, reducing monthly cloud costs by 60%, reducing the overall amount of cloud data storage by 60%, and also successfully reducing cloud data processing costs by 75%. Musk's move has shown the IT industry a new set of "small tricks" to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but this is not suitable for all enterprises, especially domestic banks.
As early as 2016, the former China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission required that all important information systems in the industry for Internet scenarios in 2020 must be migrated to cloud computing architecture platforms, and the migration ratio of other systems should not be less than 60%. So banks, especially small and medium-sized banks, are facing the challenges of new technology application on the one hand, and on the other hand, they have to control the cost of expenditure
Cao Zhen told China E-Banking Network that banks can comprehensively evaluate the "posture" of going to the cloud from at least three aspects: First, whether the cloud can achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase depends on the agility of the business application architecture and the amount and frequency of data accessed by the business. Therefore, before migrating to the cloud, it is necessary to evaluate the usage of the application system, such as considering the technical architecture and components of the application system, determining the scalability of the application system, whether it can be seamlessly migrated to the cloud, and the stability, fault recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities of the system after cloud migrationSecond, you need to evaluate the costs of cloud migration, such as cloud service fees, data transmission fees, and maintenance feesFinally, the management capabilities of the application system after migration to the cloud are evaluated, including monitoring, logs, alarms, and automated O&M.
In order to help banks control costs and improve the efficiency of digital operations, Qingyun Cloud EasyJet has gradually launched five products: Cloud Ease Hyper Convergence, Cloud Easy Jet All-in-One Machine, Cloud Easy AI All-in-One Machine, Xinchuang Cloud Easy Jet, and Cloud Easy Virtualization. At this stage, banks, especially small and medium-sized banks, pay more attention to the information innovation cloud and cloud convenience virtualization. The core reason is that in the context of information innovation, these two products are mainly used in the scenario of independent transformation of localized software and hardware, Cao Zhen said.
There are three pre-technical conditions for financial information innovation to achieve a "soft landing".
Cao Zhen believes that in terms of service capabilities, reliable cloud services need to solve at least the following three problems in order to reliably and systematically help banks achieve a "soft landing" of independent transformation of localized software and hardware:
First, heterogeneous chip technical support. For example, some applications need to run some components on the Haiguang server and the other part on the ARM server when they are transforming into information innovation. Yunyijie's solution is to reasonably deploy these heterogeneous chips to ensure the smooth operation of software and hardware. Yunyijie can support server configurations such as Haiguang and Kunpeng chip technologies, and can flexibly deploy application components to run on technically adapted servers according to needs.
Second, the challenge of introducing new technologies. Small and medium-sized financial institutions have a small number of IT technicians, tight human resources, and lack of experience in the application and management of innovative technologies, which may increase the risk of business operation. In order to solve this problem, Yunyijie has simplified and adapted the cloud service solution, enriched the management console functions, and adjusted the operation interface to make it clear and easy to understand, so that the bank's existing technical personnel can quickly grasp the operation and maintenance management of the platform, so as to improve the operation and maintenance efficiency and reduce the risk of misoperation. In order to reduce the workload of technical personnel in operation assurance, the cloud service solution can be deployed in a high-availability cluster mode, so that the financial cloud service platform has automatic operation and maintenance and fault recovery capabilities, and ensures the high-availability operation of the platform and virtual machine resources.
Third, the deployment cycle is long. The software and hardware structure of the bank's IT system is relatively complex, and the amount of data is huge and sensitive, which directly leads to the heavy task and tight time of the information innovation project. Traditional cloud platform technology is more difficult to control due to its complex technology and lengthy deployment and implementation steps, which seriously affects the project completion time. Current solutions are mostly deployed out-of-the-box. Deployers can achieve overall migration through one-click deployment, and a set of cloud-easy hyper-converged clusters can be built within one day, which is open to business use. Greatly save installation and deployment time, and leave more time for business application migration testing to ensure that the information innovation project is launched as scheduled.