How security and performance redefine banking (Case study: Standard Chartered nexus)

From the company’s launch in 2020, Standard Chartered nexus made a conscious decision to embed observability across every aspect of the company’s operations.

The company wanted to adopt a unified analytics platform to support its end-to-end use cases — from security analytics and DevOps to customer experience, business metrics monitoring and more. They also wanted a platform with an intuitive user interface that would be easy for technical and non-technical users to navigate so every employee could successfully use the solution.

Several factors lead to the decision to adopt Sumo Logic, including:

• Cloud-native architecture that provides hyper scalability
• User-friendly for all employees — technical and non-technical
• Single platform for company-wide observability and security use cases
• High-quality support for logs and metrics
• Outstanding vendor engagement and level of professional services
• Extensive API and data collection support for turnkey integration into the company’s ecosystem

Highest security standards

Standard Chartered nexus only adopts solutions that meet the highest security standards. In addition to meeting the company’s functional requirements, the Sumo Logic platform demonstrated best-in-class security principles. “We had a third-party conduct an extensive security assessment on Sumo Logic that went well, and we liked the fact that Sumo Logic had several certifications like SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and PCI,” said Mathias Faure, CTO at Standard Chartered nexus.

As a cloud-native solution with extensive APIs and collectors, Sumo Logic integrated easily, leveraging Kubernetes and supporting hundreds of microservices, distributed computing jobs and other business applications. This enabled the company to quickly gain full-stack visibility across the environment in a single snapshot.

Easily handling the bank’s data volumes, Sumo Logic analyzes 500,000 data points per minute for metrics and 100GB of daily log data, which empowers Standard Chartered nexus with hyperscaling observability. “Because we have all digital banking capabilities bundled in a box — from digital onboarding, self- servicing and assisted channel reporting — we have quite a lot happening in our hyperscale platform. Sumo Logic readily scales to our needs and gives us extreme observability around our business and technical metrics and logs,” said Faure adding that “It gives us millisecond responsiveness for capabilities around querying, dashboarding and alerting.”

Ease of use empowers technical and non-technical users

The Sumo Logic platform is so straightforward to navigate that technical and non-technical teams have all onboarded and created custom dashboards for their specific needs. The company’s 220-plus employees — from business users in marketing and finance to technical users in security and development — use Sumo Logic. Logs, metrics and dashboards deliver valuable insights that drive daily decision making as well as support strategic planning for the future.

“Sumo Logic’s simplicity is quite key for our business-wide use; otherwise, it would’ve just been a technical tool for technologists.”

Enabling best-in-class customer onboarding and responsiveness

Improving the customer onboarding journey was an early and impactful success using Sumo Logic. At the outset, Standard Chartered nexus created a best- practice service level objective (SLO) that customers would experience a fast and frictionless process when adopting a digital banking service. The bank set an SLO to service customer transactions in less than 100 milliseconds.

Leveraging Sumo Logic’s monitoring and data analytics across the onboarding cycle — both from the banking platform’s backend and the user interface — the DevOps teams pinpointed bottlenecks and identified potential drop offs. Armed with these insights, the team then rapidly rapidly optimized the business process.

“Sumo Logic’s observability of our customer onboarding experience helped us sense exactly what the customer was feeling and guided our design and direction for optimizing the process. We delivered ten process improvements over five months that significantly accelerated our responsiveness. We’re currently within the three minute range for an end-to-end onboarding — well below our original SLO target,” shared Faure. “Our list accounts and transaction api response time is now under 30ms.”

Fueling and fostering business-wide use cases

Sumo Logic has enabled teams across the company to collaborate and work from a single source of truth. As a result, this data-driven collaboration has empowered teams to move more efficiently and swiftly to fix product defects, address security issues, launch new features to market and more. A handful of the company’s many use cases include:

• Security monitoring
  “We’ve built a really good information set from our platform’s logs that feeds into Sumo Logic for all the security monitoring use cases across our customer platform. The Sumo Logic platform provides us with powerful security analytics and dashboarding capabilities that keep us informed on anything related to the application security of our solution,” said Faure. As one example, Faure shared, “We scan our code base hourly and log all the vulnerabilities that pop up. Then, we automatically create tickets for the teams to action within a given SLA, depending on the criticality. This process fosters great collaboration between our DevSecOps and DevOps teams.”
• Delivering product fixes
  With Sumo Logic observability, the quality assurance and DevOps teams rapidly move through product issues. “The testing team has dashboards for defects that they can submit to development with
  a query link. From there, the developer can look back in the data to the time when the defect was found and understand everything. For example, they can look at technical metrics and logs from one of the many microservices to obtain the whole context at a given point in time. Equipped with all that information, our turnaround time between defect-to-solution is very fast,” said Faure.
• Application performance
  The site reliability engineering (SRE) team monitors the reliability of the company’s software in the production environment. Leveraging custom dashboards, the team can quickly highlight potential bottlenecks or areas that need improvement. “Working closely with functional squads, our SRE team shares the data insights on any areas that need attention. Focused on maintaining a high point value for application performance, the squad will fix the performance issue before they roll out new functionalities,” said Faure.