Cloudchef Wins Guangzhou Bank Cloud Management Project, Driving Digital Smart Banking Transformation

Cloudchef Wins Guangzhou Bank Cloud Management Project, Driving Digital Smart Banking Transformation

Published: 2020-09-30 14:14

Shanghai Qianyun Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Cloudchef") recently won the Guangzhou Bank cloud management project, standing out among numerous cloud management vendors with its advanced cloud service middle platform concepts and the outstanding practical capabilities of the SmartCMP product. This project will support the implementation of Guangzhou Bank's "FinTech Empowerment" strategy and accelerate the development of digital smart banking.

COMPANY INTRODUCTION

Founded in September 1996, Guangzhou Bank is the largest city commercial bank in the Pearl River Delta region by asset size. As of the end of 2019, Guangzhou Bank's total assets reached RMB 561.231 billion, with deposits of RMB 356.543 billion and loans of RMB 294.530 billion. The bank has been consistently ranked among the Global Top 500 Banks, China's Top 500 Service Enterprises, China's Top 100 Banks, Guangdong's Top 100 Tax-Contributing Enterprises, and has received honors including the China Banking Industry Civilized and Standardized Service Demonstration Unit.

In the cloud era, traditional banks are actively developing internet finance, and financial technology has attracted significant attention and grown rapidly within the industry. The rapid advancement of FinTech has driven banks to reform their business strategies and technology R&D. Embracing this trend, Guangzhou Bank proposed a "FinTech Empowerment" development strategy based on deep understanding of financial technology, aiming to build a lightweight bank with modern digital core competitive advantages. By fully leveraging innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and blockchain, the bank launched its "Smart Banking" project, using this as an opportunity to enhance financial service quality while practicing inclusive finance and promoting financial services for the real economy.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The rapid advancement of financial technology has driven banks to reform their business strategies and technology R&D. With the rapid development of banking business, Guangzhou Bank's IT operations face the following challenges:

First, robust demand for business system development and new system resources. Since 2018, IT resources have grown exponentially, and with the new core system entering the R&D and testing phase, demand has further increased. Operations management work — from project, product, and requirement development through operations — has largely relied on institutional guidelines and detailed rules formed from years of accumulated management experience.

Second, the growing number of financial product lines and expanding user base have increased demands for IT service equipment stability, capacity, self-service capabilities, and agility. Management and operations complexity continues to grow, and security challenges — particularly information asset security — are becoming increasingly severe.

Third, aligned with the bank's overall business development strategy and implementing the "technology empowerment" approach, the bank is accelerating its FinTech footprint to drive business innovation. The technology team continues to grow, with the FinTech department's in-house and outsourced R&D personnel already reaching a scale of over one hundred. How to further improve resource delivery capabilities and continuously improve resource utilization has become a key challenge in IT operations management.

Facing these challenges, Guangzhou Bank urgently needed to build a unified management platform and a unified IT service portal, creating agile IT that uses platform capabilities to replace manual operations, improve automation levels, enhance management and operations efficiency, improve resource utilization and security compliance, and reduce both costs and security risks.

GUANGZHOU BANK CLOUD MANAGEMENT PROJECT OBJECTIVES

1. Building a Unified IT Service Portal

Build a unified service platform for business users, IT management, and operations staff, providing unified governance of heterogeneous infrastructure including on-premises virtualization, physical bare metal devices, desktop cloud platforms, and container cloud platforms. Deliver unified full lifecycle resource management, process management, monitoring management, and analytics.

At the same time, through the IT service platform's service operations and self-service modules, standardize, service-orient, and enable self-service delivery of IT resources, integrating the enterprise's existing LDAP/ITIL systems to ensure secure and compliant implementation of IT resource service capabilities.

2. Building Agile IT to Promote Continuous Application Building and Release

In the IT service platform development, beyond rapid and agile use and delivery of IT infrastructure resources — where requesting departments can perform self-service across the full IT resource lifecycle — departments can also continuously improve application delivery efficiency and CI/CD capabilities through the cloud management platform.

Additionally, container cloud development is an important direction for the IT infrastructure department. The bank's IT infrastructure department needs to efficiently deploy and manage production-grade container clusters, ensuring R&D departments can build complete frameworks and processes for developing, testing, and deploying business applications on container cloud — including microservice framework selection, business microservice transformation support, and CI/CD delivery pipeline construction — ultimately supporting the new core system's future business system transformation and meeting the bank's business development needs for the next decade and beyond, maintaining competitive advantage in increasingly fierce industry competition.

3. Integrating Security Gateways to Enhance Development/Testing Cloud Security Compliance

Security and compliance are eternal themes of IT infrastructure development and cloud architecture upgrades. On one hand, infrastructure delivery must be standardized, process-driven, and compliant. On the other hand, resource usage must be secure and auditable.

SmartCMP DRIVING IT CLOUD SERVICE MIDDLE PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT

Based on Cloudchef's SmartCMP cloud management platform, referencing international standard IT service management architecture, and incorporating an understanding of Guangzhou Bank's IT service platform requirements and project objectives, Cloudchef designed the following IT cloud service middle platform architecture for Guangzhou Bank:

1. Multi-Cloud Unified Management Platform

SmartCMP provides unified governance of heterogeneous infrastructure at the bottom layer and integrates with the customer's existing business process platform at the top layer. Through a unified portal, it delivers automated cloud services to different tenants, departments, roles, and users, building innovative IT management, service, and analytics capabilities between operations administrators, development and testing personnel, and business departments — forming a resource governance, IT governance, and cross-departmental collaboration platform.

Through a single console, it connects, orchestrates, and analyzes heterogeneous environments including private cloud, public cloud, container platforms, x86 bare metal servers, SDN, and SDS. It provides flexible service orchestration and design, user self-service requests, self-service operations, integrated monitoring and alerting capabilities, and policy-based resource reclamation — achieving end-to-end full automation and lifecycle management of multi-cloud resources and services, delivering Everything as a Service (IaaS/IaaS+/PaaS/XaaS), operations management (ITOM & ITSM), and a one-stop automation and DevOps solution.

2. Everything IT as a Service — The Foundation for Building Agile IT

SmartCMP provides a complete IT service management solution, designing WYSIWYG service blueprints through TOSCA, designing service and approval workflows through the BPMN process engine, and leveraging custom forms to build IT services including Guangzhou Bank's infrastructure platform, application software, runtime environments, script tasks, and work orders. Development and operations personnel can request resources on demand, with automated deployment of bare metal, virtual machines, containers, and application environments.

3. Full Lifecycle Resource Management

First, SmartCMP provides multi-cloud heterogeneous resource management capabilities, governing Guangzhou Bank's current heterogeneous infrastructure resources. Through the platform's resource pooling capabilities, resources from an infrastructure platform are mapped to one or more logical resource pools for flexible segmentation and quota management, with resource tags applied based on data center, network zone, performance parameters, and other attributes. Users select resources and deployment strategies with different tags based on business requirements, and the platform automatically selects the appropriate cloud platform resources to host applications based on tags and policies.

Subsequently, SmartCMP provides complete automated service lifecycle management for cloud resources and applications, including service design and publishing, self-service requests, request approval, automated deployment, daily operations management, and service reclamation.

4. Organization-Based Management and Processes

SmartCMP cloud management platform can map to Guangzhou Bank's organizational structure and business departments, setting service specifications, service policies, approval workflows, and role-based service management permissions for each department.

5. Secure and Unified Architecture

SmartCMP cloud components can be effectively managed and utilized according to the enterprise's internal organizational structure. SmartCMP also focuses on how to use resources more securely, which encompasses two aspects: secure access and usage of resources, and data backup and recovery. Through a single SmartCMP console, bastion host usage, cloud resource backup, recovery management, and self-service are implemented — meeting the organization's internal backup requirements, ensuring service security and business continuity, reducing IT staff burden, and lowering operations risks.

"For a tree to grow tall, its roots must be firm; for water to flow far, its source must be clear." The financial industry is currently undergoing deeper transformation, and the widespread and deep application of technology is the inexhaustible driving force behind enterprise transformation.

The Guangzhou Bank IT cloud service middle platform project will be an exploration of IT system-level development, rapidly delivering IT resources to business systems and processes through Cloudchef's SmartCMP cloud management platform, deepening the value of IT applications. At the same time, this project will open the door for Guangzhou Bank to move toward integrated operations monitoring and control, automation, and intelligent cloud operations. In the future, it will gradually integrate financial industry security standards, audit frameworks, and backup and recovery platforms to build a more secure and reliable financial cloud.

About Cloudchef

Founded in 2016, Cloudchef is a leading Chinese cloud management software and service provider. Through outstanding cloud management product technology and services, Cloudchef has helped hundreds of enterprises across fintech, government affairs and healthcare, energy, high-end manufacturing, internet, and new retail sectors comprehensively improve IT management levels. Landmark projects have been successfully delivered for major industry clients including Bank of Communications, Yonyou Group, China Merchants Securities, and WM Motor. Cloudchef has also expanded into international markets with successful projects in multiple overseas countries, with international business expected to achieve breakthrough growth in the future.

Cloudchef's flagship product, SmartCMP Intelligent Cloud Management Platform, connects, orchestrates, and analyzes multi-cloud resources through a single console; enables self-service requests and automated delivery of various ITaaS (IT as a Service), significantly saving operations and development staff time; provides end-to-end management from service design, requests, monitoring, alerting, and operations through to policy-based automated reclamation — achieving one-stop efficient governance of multi-cloud resources while continuously optimizing multi-cloud workloads and reducing enterprise cloud costs.