EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Looking for a better approach to incident response (IR) management?

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is growing in popularity, especially among banking institutions, and for good reason. SRE offers a means of fielding customer incident reports, minus the cumbersome and complex communication protocols.

For banks, incident communication chains typically take the form of a three-tier structure. First, a customer call center fields incoming reports. Using a script book, the call center representatives attempt to resolve the issue. Should the issue prove too tough to tackle, it’s escalated to a second tier composed of system administrators. When the system administrators are out of answers, the issue gets kicked over to a series of software engineers and developers. As questions arise within the third tier, they are sometimes shuffled back to the initial call screeners.

“This complex feedback loop among siloed, hierarchical teams is a large part of the reason incident resolution eats up so much time and such a large proportion of the budget,” writes The Wall Street Journal.

Leveraging SRE translates to keeping the customer call center, absolving the tier-two gatekeepers of their responsibilities, and deploying automated monitoring systems that can recognize issues before they evolve into major incidents.

“If you have a good script, it won’t fail. If you ask a human to do the same thing a thousand times, they will definitely fail,” says Stig Sorenson, Bloomberg’s Executive Sponsor of Site Reliability Engineering, pointing to the utility in automation.

SRE improves flow and service quality, although it does require a 4-5 person team of dedicated experts. However, as an enterprise, the adoption of SRE better positions you to compete for emerging tech talent, as many young professions look for work cultures that actively embrace innovation.

To get more information about search reliability engineering, visit The Wall Street Journal.