Payments Testing - March 19, 2024
As we saw in our most recent blog series, “It’s Time to Move Your Payments Testing to the Cloud,” both cloud computing and APIs are hot topics in financial services. According to Cornerstone Advisors’ What’s Going On in Banking 2021 report, these technologies top the list of strategic deployments that financial institutions are planning for 2021.
And while the movement to cloud computing has been slower than anticipated in the banking industry, it now appears that financial services companies are ready to embrace the technology and take advantage of all the benefits that cloud can offer, including:
- Accessibility from wherever your teams are located.
- Faster time to market for new products and solutions.
- Flexible deployment options.
- Scalability, both up and down, to fit the organization’s needs regardless of size.
- Lower costs.
Cloud is at the center of what Gartner calls “Anywhere Operations” and as they describe, “An anywhere operations model will be vital for businesses to emerge successfully from COVID-19. At its core, this operating model allows for business to be accessed, delivered, and enabled anywhere — where customers, employers and business partners operate in physically remote environments.”
There can be little doubt that the time for cloud is now. For organizations that deploy ATMs, this includes extending your test lab into the cloud. Given all that has happened in the past 13+ months, and the specific impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has on the ATM industry, leveraging the cloud will help ensure that “Anywhere Operations” extends across all of your payment channels and testing capabilities.
Over the past year, we have worked closely with clients and prospects to help move their ATM testing environments toward the anywhere operations goal and deploy their virtualized ATMs into the cloud. Even though the technology has matured significantly over the past few years, we know that managing a successful cloud deployment still requires a lot of preparation and planning.
Even though there is no standard ATM deployment playbook yet available, there is no reason to delay. By utilizing the years of experience and deep knowledge our staff have with ATM virtualization technology, as well as their understanding of how the ATM operating system works, Paragon is actively helping organizations successfully migrate their virtualized ATMs images up into the cloud.
These companies are now able to provide remote access to their ATM developers, testers, and QA staff anytime from anywhere. They now have the additional opportunity to automate their ATM testing, as well as test many fault conditions that are difficult (and sometime impossible) to test with a physical ATM. Also important in today’s environment is the ability to drive the virtual ATMs from other enterprise systems via a RESTful API.
To be sure, we did not get to this point without a lot of hard work and some creative experimentation, as well as some good old fashion trial and error. In the next post, we’ll look in more detail at some of the more technical aspects of what is required to deploy ATMs into the cloud, as well as some of the lessons we have learned to date.
