Zhongtai Securities’ Path to Advanced DevOps Standards: Inside Their Assessment Success

Both domestic and international large enterprises have demonstrated that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and the DevOps continuous delivery pipeline platform based on these standards can significantly improve quality, efficiency, and safety, enhancing market competitiveness.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) has released a series of "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" standards, which provide important guidance for enterprise DevOps implementation. Companies from banking, securities, insurance, telecommunications, and internet sectors are actively participating in CAICT assessments, improving their IT capabilities.

On December 15, 2023, the GOLF+IT New Governance Leadership Forum was held in Beijing, where CAICT announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results.

Zhongtai Securities participated with its "Centralized Operations Platform System" and successfully passed the CAICT DevOps Technical Operations Level‑2 assessment, indicating that its capabilities are at an advanced domestic level.

To date, Zhongtai Securities has completed seven CAICT DevOps standard assessments: one continuous delivery, one technical operations, three DevSecOps (security and risk management), and two system and tool assessments.

Interview with Dong Hongtao (Deputy Director, FinTech Committee, Zhongtai Securities)

Q: Please introduce the project you evaluated.

A: The project is a centralized operations platform integrating account systems and trading counter operations, providing services such as account opening, closure, data modification, and permission management. Since its inception in 2017, it has evolved into an enterprise‑grade, cross‑business platform enabling single‑sign‑on, unified terminals, and intelligent operations to fully support wealth management transformation.

Q: How do you feel about passing the DevOps Technical Operations Level‑2 assessment?

A: We are delighted that our platform passed the assessment, thanks to the experts’ guidance and the project team’s effort. The assessment validates our technical operations capability and drives further optimization.

Q: How did you consider the technical operations assessment for this project?

A: As the core system for branch offices, reliability, business continuity, and user experience are critical. The assessment helped us verify our technical operation safeguards and identify improvement directions, which is vital for our digital transformation.

Q: What does the assessment mean for your team and what improvements were made?

A: The assessment recognized our capabilities in monitoring, incident, change, capacity, cost, and business continuity management. It also enhanced cross‑team collaboration, broke information silos, increased transparency, and improved overall efficiency. Technical safeguards were refined, and monitoring architecture was optimized.

Q: What are the distinctive features of the IT system, and how was it planned and designed?

A: The platform aims for unified management, intelligent efficiency, paperless operations, and high‑availability architecture. It integrates AI technologies such as OCR, facial recognition, voice recognition, RPA, deep learning, and blockchain to achieve intelligent customer service and robust technical operation.

Interview with Zhang Jieyu (Deputy General Manager, IT Management Department, Zhongtai Securities)

Q: Was the assessment process smooth? What challenges did you encounter and how were they resolved?

A: The process was generally smooth but involved extensive coverage of 35 capability items across seven domains. User experience management was a weak point; after multiple communications and testing, we implemented improvements that yielded positive results.

Q: How do you view the DevOps standard and its benefits for your enterprise?

A: The DevOps standard provides a mature, industry‑wide framework that guides technical operation capabilities such as monitoring, incident, change, emergency, capacity, cost, and user experience management, helping us benchmark against industry leaders and enhance digital maturity.

Q: What are your future plans regarding DevOps?

A: We will continue to strengthen our advantages in areas like incident and change management, while addressing weaker points by aligning with the DevOps standard and expert recommendations, deepening our technical operation capabilities step by step.

Q: What is your outlook on the development prospects of DevOps?

A: DevOps bridges development, testing, and operations to enable agile, efficient delivery and rapid, stable response to business needs. With ongoing digital and cloud evolution, DevOps will play a crucial role across industries, becoming increasingly essential for improving software delivery speed and quality.

Platform Features

Unified management: single entry, unified authentication, unified permission, one‑login for all services.

Intelligent efficiency: optimized workflows and AI‑driven automation.

Paperless operations: full digitalization of personal and institutional processes.

High‑availability architecture: multi‑node clusters, database clusters with multiple backups to meet SLA targets.

Industry Participation Statistics

* Statistics are current as of December 15, 2023. Data are from the official DevOps assessment website.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, led by CAICT with contributions from cloud open‑source alliances, high‑efficiency operations communities, BATJ, and major financial, telecom, and internet enterprises, is the first domestic and international DevOps series standard. It is the most complete, authoritative, and industry‑guiding DevOps standard, endorsed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading enterprises.

In July 2020, the DevOps standard was officially concluded by the United Nations‑affiliated standardization organization ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The overall DevOps architecture includes processes (agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations), application design, security and risk management (DevSecOps), system and tool management, business value management, collaborative development and operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

Contact Information

CAICT – Liu Kailing: 156‑5078‑6171 (WeChat), [email protected]

CAICT – Bai Hanxiong: 159‑1076‑9206 (WeChat), [email protected]

GreatOps Community – Wei Huanxin: 185‑0025‑5645 (WeChat), [email protected]