Compliance at speed

Achieve performance goals in the face of compliance issues.

By Mark Lustig
June 17, 2015
Ilya Chashnick Ilya Chashnick (source: Wikimedia)

Download a free copy of Compliance at Speed, an O’Reilly report by Mark Lustig that breaks down the IT issues facing finance, healthcare, and other heavily regulated industries.

Today’s technology should work and perform without issues. When we build systems that work and perform, nobody pays attention; when they’re slow and unstable, everyone notices. This sentiment was no truer than during last year’s Healthcare.gov debacle. Building systems that work and meet our user’s expectations is always the number one priority.

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Regardless of who we work for, the challenges of performance and DevOps are universal. There is one constraint larger companies seem to face more often — regulatory compliance. As privacy concerns have become more pervasive, compliance affects all of our companies in one way or another.

Reputation is based on trust. If I’m looking up my credit card balance and I end up seeing someone else’s information, I’ve lost trust in the credit card company, and they’ve lost a customer.

Large banks and health care organizations have been dealing with compliance for years, but every industry has constraints. Online retailers need to meet privacy and security standards. The social networking industry faces regulations specific to consumer protection and the use of customer information. No industry is immune to meeting compliance, as emerging regulations, both domestic and international, create more challenges to achieving performance objectives each year. Any website that uses, stores, or processes personal or payment information must address these challenges.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with large enterprises across a breadth of industries, notably financial services, health care, and insurance. Three things have become clear to me:

  • Compliance affects everyone

  • To be competitive, performance is mandatory for business success

  • To minimize risk to reputation, performance and compliance objectives must both be met

Addressing these challenges and ensuring success takes discipline. A process should be followed to achieve performance goals. “Compliance at Speed: Achieving Performance in Enterprise Applications,” helps you understand the arduous task of achieving performance while meeting compliance requirements. You’ll learn how to:

  1. Define the business goals for performance

  2. Identify constraints (business and regulatory)

  3. Design and develop for performance goals

  4. Execute performance measurement and testing

  5. Implement performance monitoring

  6. Mitigate risks

You can address compliance issues without dragging the development process back to the 1990s and waterfall models. Compliance may seem at odds with agile development models, but you can implement a consistent process across multiple methodologies, including agile, SCRUM, and today’s continuous deployment and integration models. Though many highly regulated industries are slow to adopt CI/CD, addressing performance throughout the development life cycle will ensure that you reach performance goals.

To add context, I’ve included case studies identifying performance challenges created by adhering to regulatory requirements. Each study discusses the strategies used to address the challenges you face.

Addressing performance by itself isn’t innovative, but meeting compliance standards, while addressing performance and delivering via continuous deployment is a true innovation that more large enterprises are doing successfully.

Post topics: Performance
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