Software development in the banking and finance industry often feels like operating under heavy constraints. Regulation, compliance, high upfront costs, strict privacy requirements, legacy infrastructure, and a risk-averse mindset all contribute to a slower pace of change.
Despite these constraints, leading financial institutions like Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, and Wells Fargo have embraced cloud transformation and adopted DevSecOps and cloud-native architectural practices.
This shift has been enabled by cloud providers such as Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and HPE offering solutions that meet strict financial compliance requirements. Additionally, cloud-native core banking platforms like Thought Machine are helping banks move off legacy systems. The result: better competitiveness, reduced costs, improved hiring potential, real-time capabilities, and accelerated product innovation.
As part of this transformation, banks are modernizing their developer toolchains—shifting from on-premise software to cloud-native solutions.
At Cloudsmith, we’re seeing increasing demand from financial organizations for SaaS-based, cloud-native artifact management tools. On-prem requirements are declining. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of cloud-native package management for financial institutions.
They require tools that:
Traditionally, banks have hosted critical workloads in their own data centers due to privacy and regulatory concerns. While they have long recognized the potential cost savings of cloud, legacy systems and business-as-usual culture slowed adoption.
That resistance has softened as cloud technology has matured. Many institutions, especially during the pandemic, used the opportunity to re-evaluate IT strategy and begin transformation efforts. Notable examples include:
Alan McIntyre, Senior Banking Director at Accenture, notes: “A key factor causing ‘core to the cloud’ to reach a tipping point is that cloud-native core banking applications like Thought Machine, Mambu, and Finxact have matured to the point where the migration is worthwhile.”
Maintaining physical data centers is no longer a neutral decision—it’s a drag on progress.
To compete with fintech and big tech entrants, banks must deliver new products faster. Cloud infrastructure enables teams to iterate and release more rapidly.
As Rohan Amin, CPO at Chase, put it: "Everything is moving to real-time." Customers expect up-to-date account balances and instant transactions. Cloud-native systems enable real-time data processing and service delivery.
Cloud-native platforms automatically scale resources to match load, improving reliability and uptime. Trading desks, for example, benefit from elastic compute when market volumes spike.
Cloud providers offer robust, externally audited security controls (e.g., ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 2) and benefit from economies of scale. While on-prem systems require expensive and resource-intensive security operations, cloud services centralize and automate this capability.
With secure-by-design architecture and proper DevSecOps practices, cloud-native systems can meet or exceed traditional on-prem security standards.
Cloud eliminates the need for hardware procurement, patching, and physical disaster recovery sites. This reduces both capital and operational expenditures. When factoring in staff overhead, the TCO advantage becomes even clearer.
Global developer teams need fast, consistent access to packages. Cloud-native solutions with integrated CDNs and smart caching reduce latency and improve collaboration.
Modern engineers want to work with up-to-date tools. Legacy stacks and outdated workflows make it harder to hire and retain talent. Embracing automation and cloud-native tooling supports team productivity and recruitment.
Cloud-native package management helps teams deliver software faster and more securely. At Cloudsmith, we eliminate the operational overhead of managing infrastructure, updates, and scaling.
Our Package Delivery Network (PDN) ensures optimized global delivery of packages, artifacts, and containers, improving deployment speeds and release cycles.
Java and Scala dominate due to performance and maintainability. C#/.NET and C++ remain common, particularly in trading systems. Go and Rust are emerging alternatives due to performance and developer ergonomics.
Data-intensive workloads in banking require packages like Python (wheel), R (CRAN), and Conda for statistical computing and machine learning. Package managers must handle large volumes of dependencies across hybrid teams.
Cloud-native deployment patterns rely on Docker, Helm, and Terraform. At Cloudsmith, we support all major formats, enabling centralized management of mixed-language and containerized projects.
Our multi-format repositories simplify tooling and access control. We act as a universal control point across your software supply chain.
Recent high-profile supply chain attacks—SolarWinds, CodeCov, Log4Shell—have elevated the role of package management in enterprise security.
Over 80% of modern software contains open-source components. A single compromised OSS package can propagate widely across financial institutions.
The solution isn’t abandoning open source but improving visibility and trust with:
At Cloudsmith, we provide end-to-end visibility into artifact metadata, checksums, build origin, and upstream sources. We enhance protection by proxying OSS from public repositories and reducing exposure.
Security features required for SaaS artifact management in banking include:
At Cloudsmith, we offer a single source of truth for artifacts across all formats. We promote automation, traceability, and security.
Banks are moving to the cloud—not just for infrastructure, but for developer tooling. Cloud-native package management is a key component of this transformation.
Engineers in finance need solutions that support formats like Maven, Conda, Docker, Helm, and more. They also need automation, compliance, performance, and scalability.
At Cloudsmith, we help fintech and banking teams modernize their pipelines and secure their software supply chains.
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