Inside Zhongtai Securities’ Award‑Winning DevOps Platform: Lessons and Impact

Large‑scale enterprises have proven that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and the DevOps continuous delivery pipeline platform, based on those standards, can significantly improve quality, efficiency, safety, and agility, boosting market competitiveness.

On July 28, 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) released the latest batch of DevOps system and tool standard assessment results.

Zhongtai Securities Co., Ltd. participated with its BeeBird Efficiency Platform and passed the CAICT "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" system and tool technical requirements assessment, with the Release Management Module achieving an excellent rating.

Zhongtai Securities is the first securities firm to pass the "Release Management Module" assessment. To date, it has passed three of the four assessable DevOps standards (continuous delivery, security & risk management, system and tool assessment), indicating a leading domestic level of DevOps capability.

Assessment Unit: China Academy of Information and Communications Technology

CAICT Director He Baohong announced the results.

-Q&A-

Q: Please introduce your company and the project you evaluated.

Zhang Yong (CIO): Zhongtai Securities, founded in 2001, is a large listed securities broker with over 9,000 employees, 45 branches, and 284 securities offices across 28 provinces. It offers brokerage, underwriting, investment consulting, proprietary trading, financial advisory, margin financing, fund distribution, custody, and futures services, serving more than 7.5 million customers and managing assets exceeding one trillion yuan.

The evaluated project, the BeeBird Efficiency Platform, is an internally developed infrastructure platform guided by DevOps principles and tailored to securities‑industry security and compliance needs. It integrates multi‑environment CI/CD, code quality inspection, automated testing, release approval, and performance reporting, enabling small‑iteration delivery, higher efficiency, and stronger technical support for digital transformation.

The platform provides multi‑environment delivery, visualized processes, automated testing, intelligent operations, standardized workflows, and performance dashboards, solving collaboration challenges among developers, testers, and operations while raising the overall fintech management level.

Q: How does the assessment feel?

Zhang Yong: We are delighted that the BeeBird platform passed the CAICT release‑management assessment. Since its launch in early 2019, it has executed over 300,000 CI/CD cycles, becoming an indispensable core tool. DevOps has shortened the time from code commit to production release, automating the entire pipeline and saving substantial labor costs. Release efficiency has improved more than tenfold, and we have integrated DevSecOps to shift security left, enabling early detection and remediation while maintaining speed.

Q: Why did you choose to participate in the assessment?

Identify and improve shortcomings of the existing tool platform.

Standardize development and release processes, address quality gate weaknesses, and reduce production risks.

Enhance release capabilities, supporting multi‑strategy deployments for stable production.

Foster a DevOps culture and strengthen collaboration among development, testing, and operations.

The assessment helped us achieve the intended outcomes, refining the DevOps tool platform and accelerating business value delivery.

Q: What changes did the assessment bring?

The assessment promoted agile transformation, process standardization, metric visualization, and continuous improvement of Zhongtai’s DevOps system, supporting the digital transformation of wealth management and improving IT responsiveness and development efficiency.

Q: What difficulties did you encounter and how were they solved?

Xiang Yuanwu (Project Manager): As the first securities firm to assess the release‑management tool, we faced a lack of reference material, requiring extensive research, testing, and iteration. We also had to remodel the system within a tight timeframe, overcoming technical challenges through multiple iteration cycles to meet the excellent‑level standards.

Q: What value has the assessment delivered?

Standardized development processes and ensured security and compliance.

Increased delivery efficiency, reducing development cycle time by 0.5‑1 day per iteration.

Reduced testing effort by automating regression tests, cutting test cycles from 2‑3 days to 6‑8 hours and security testing from 3‑5 days to 30 minutes.

Saved roughly 20 person‑years of testing effort annually.

The release‑management module now supports multiple deployment strategies (canary, blue‑green), automated health checks, and automatic rollback, ensuring stable and continuous production services.

To date, Zhongtai Securities has three projects that passed the DevOps Capability Maturity Model assessments: continuous delivery, security & risk management, and system & tool.

Statistics show that, as of July 28, 2022, 56 enterprises across six major industries (state‑owned banks, joint‑stock banks, city commercial banks, internet, securities, insurance, telecom) have submitted 149 projects for DevOps assessments, with the securities sector listed among them.

The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series standards, led by CAICT with contributions from top internet companies and financial institutions, is the most comprehensive and authoritative DevOps standard in China and has been adopted by many leading enterprises. The standard was also finalized by the ITU‑T in July 2020, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard.

For inquiries about DevOps standard assessments, contact CAICT (Liu Kailing) at 156‑5078‑6171 or [email protected], or the GreatOps community (Wei Huanxin) at 185‑0025‑5645 or [email protected].