Enclave-based architecture: A blueprint for cloud-native financial institutions

Danske Bank is implementing ideas and practices such as CI/CD, microservices, and DevOps within the extreme conditions of a financial enterprise. Angelo Agatino Nicolosi explains how the bank is defining and delivering brand-new financial services at startup speed through the simple concept of an enclave.

Have you ever noticed that in almost any technical conference, there’s a talk that at some point compares the new shiny wonderful IT world with the old dusty gray one, and then there it is—the example slide: a great, green, sunny IT startup with happy, young, awesome devs set against the boring, gray, old bank with monkeys dancing around a monolithic mainframe. Well, we can’t even really call it discrimination. It’s mostly true, and of course, “for good reason”—or at least this is all we keep repeating to each other every morning when we get to the office. Danske Bank grew tired of all this and started to talk across its enterprise sil…ehm…towers in order to find a possible way forward. Thanks to the pressure of the business demanding greater agility, the bank came up with a great set of arrows and boxes on a PowerPoint deck called the “digitalization blueprint.” That was around three years ago. Angelo Agatino Nicolosi explains how the bank is defining and delivering brand-new financial services at startup speed with its legacy core banking platform through the simple concept of an enclave. Topics include: