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In today’s rapidly evolving digital finance landscape, staying ahead means more than just innovation – it demands efficiency, agility, ironclad security, and regulatory compliance. One of the world’s largest financial services firms, with a global footprint spanning over 60 countries and nearly 300,000 employees, the company’s goal was to streamline processes for brokers, bankers, traders, money managers, and back-office operational teams, while maintaining stringent regulatory compliance deadlines and security standards.
While they made substantial investments in AI and automation to enhance operational efficiency and customer experience, they faced mounting pressure to deliver effectively on all fronts. There were gating issues that centered on one area: their testing infrastructure was slowing them down and presenting significant business risk.
Testing Bottlenecks, Compliance Pressure, and Soaring Costs
As the number and variety of devices in their environment expanded, the organization struggled with testing delays, resulting in a growing backlog. These delays impacted on the timely application of network updates, leading to high maintenance and support costs for outdated network hardware and software. The ability to meet regulations that require validating code and infrastructure are in compliance, often twice annually, was in doubt. Manual testing simply could not keep pace with the accelerating magnitude of complexity in their global siloed environments. Their key issues included:
A testing backlog that showed no signs of shrinking
An inability to validate infrastructure at the necessary scale and speed
The $100s of millions spent on outsourced testing
Internal automation efforts that barely scratched the surface – only 10 of 1,800 use cases were automated in a year
The risk? Missed regulatory deadlines, rising support costs for outdated systems, the growing threat of costly outages, and rising operational costs. In their review of challenges, they identified core objectives to help address them:
Eliminate the inefficiency in the test lab and modernize the lab infrastructure
Reduce delays in releasing features into production
Meet regulatory requirements for product code certification, supporting biannual testing
Reduce the time required to certify new patches, software releases, and hardware platforms
Expand test capacity to meet the growing demand
The Solution: End-to-end Lab & Test Automation
To address these issues, the organization turned to Spirent for a comprehensive, scalable, automated and future-proof solution. This entailed the creation of a customized Lab as a Service (LaaS) environment enabling dynamic automated deployments which enabled complete inventory management, facilitating the sharing of lab resources to maximize test resource utilization. This solution would be available to anyone anywhere around the world 24x7x365.
Spirent’s test lab automation solution approach
Spirent developed an 18-month ROI model and deployed a solution that leveraged Spirent’s full automation portfolio, including Velocity Core (for lab automation), Velocity iTest (for scalable test automation), and Velocity Switches (for seamless lab resource access), along with engaging the Spirent Managed Solutions group to offer virtualization and automation expertise to facilitate the rollout and management of the test and lab automation.
This powerful combination enabled 24/7 automated lab access and reservation management, sharable, standardized test scripts to enhance cross-department collaboration. It dramatically increased test coverage to meet biannual compliance cycles and accelerated test execution and reporting, powered by real-time analytics dashboards.
The Results: Time Reclaimed, and Efficiencies Assured
The transformation was both swift and significant with a 60% improvement in one sample targeted category of the testing, part of a larger program that continues to deliver evolving benefits.
The shift from manual lab processes to analytics-driven automation redefined how the organization operates – improving not just testing efficiency, but its overall security and compliance posture. After the first 18 months, the customer reported these improvements and benefits:
Time & cost savings – Tests run continuously, even during non-work hours, increasing productivity and output.
Enhanced test coverage – Automated testing across test cases.
Web-based lab access – Single location for all test sources and automation assets.
Test suite management – Create and run test suites, schedules reservations, 24/7.
Comprehensive reporting – Store and manage automated test reports, facilitating tracking results over time.
From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs
With Spirent’s Velocity Automation Portfolio and Managed Solutions, this financial giant turned a mounting operational challenge into a showcase of modern efficiency. By automating their testing and lab environments, they unlocked enormous cost savings and future-proofed their ability to meet compliance and performance demands — all without compromising on quality or security. Improvements and business value for the enterprise continue to expand efficiencies and benefits as the solution matures.
Learn more. Read our case study Revolutionizing Financial Operations and our white paper Ensure Resilient and Compliant Enterprise Networks with Automated Testing.
