KeyBank: An AIOps Success Story

We recently hosted a webcast featuring KeyBank and its AIOps success story. 

This large U.S. bank has fully embraced digital services, which has increased both the complexity of its IT environment as well as the service expectations of its customers. 

KeyBank is the primary subsidiary of KeyCorp, a regional bank headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. KeyBank’s customer base spans retail, small business, corporate, and investment clients. The institution has the distinction of having the first female chairman & CEO to head one of the nation’s largest financial services companies.

The webcast features Mick Miller, KeyBank’s senior cloud native product manager. 

Mick – a self-described “DevOps ninja” – began by describing the operations environment confronting all IT professionals today. IT systems are becoming ever more complex — comprised of modular, distributed, dynamic and ephemeral architecture. This sea change amounts to a major transformation of the role that IT plays in driving value for the business.  

Digital Transformation at KeyBank

Digital transformation of the banking industry is being driven by a number of closely interconnected trends. 

“That there is hugely increased demand for all banking services to go digital,” Mick explains. “At KeyBank, everything is moving online, on both our retail consumer and corporate banking sides. IT Operations is contending with this increasing velocity of change.”

For example, Mick says that KeyBank’s change management team is now processing 4X the number of changes per week than they did only two years ago. 

There are a number of forces at work in the banking industry (and to an extent, all industries) driving what KeyBank describes as “change velocity”. 

First is the expansion of digital banking services in response to customer demands. In order to scale service delivery easily and uniformly, containers have emerged. DevOps’ drive for continuous integration & delivery has sped up development cycles, with deployments to its production environment many times a day. KeyBank has adopted high availability architectures with multiple failover in its data centers, supporting both cloud native services as well as cloud bursts for its on premise systems. 

Mick states, “The data volumes we process are truly astounding. KeyBank’s online banking system alone clocks 35 customer logins per second!”

Improving Customer Experience at “Change Velocity”

KeyBank’s overarching business objective is retaining its customers, which span individuals, small businesses, corporations and investment clients. Today’s banking customers have heightened expectations, with more choices available in the market. Ultimately they vote with their feet, easily changing to a competitive option if their bank leaves them unsatisfied. 

To keep the customers it has, and to attract new ones, the bank has focused on improving its customer experience across the board. KeyBank captures click-level events to discover how customers are using its systems. While scheduled outages are normal in banking, with its batch processing, near 100% uptime has become expected. Restoration of services is now measured in seconds not hours, lest the bank’s phone lines light up with unhappy customers. 

To meet these demands, KeyBank has focused on attaining near complete visibility on the state of its infrastructure. 

“IT Operations professionals, we need more data, not less,” Mick says. “But based on my experience, the demands of increased system monitoring is breaking legacy monitoring approaches and exposing their limitations. Humans simply can’t keep up any more, and we can’t hire our way out of this problem.”

Mick determined that increases in operations staff simply weren’t going to scale equal to its rate of data ingestion. Perhaps more importantly, KeyBank understands that its legacy systems do not learn or predict! 

“Not having self learning and prediction in event correlation forces you to get stuck in reaction response mode,” Mick contends.

Mick and KeyBank concluded that AIOps, with its new AI and machine learning models, was the answer.

 

View This AIOps Success Story on Demand

 

This is just the beginning of KeyBank’s AIOps success story. Listen on demand to the full webcast , and hear Mick explain:

• Why legacy monitoring systems can’t scale
• The new strategy required for system monitoring
• The limitations of rules-based event correlation solutions
• How AIOps uniquely combines AI and machine learning to liberate IT Ops

The webcast includes a quick demonstration of Moogsoft AIOps platform as well as a lively Q&A session which dives deep into KeyBank’s implementation process. 

What are you waiting for? Watch the full webcast on demand.