How Zhaotai Securities Achieved Leading DevOps Excellence Through Standards

Large enterprises worldwide have demonstrated that standardization and tool empowerment are crucial for success. The DevOps standards and the DevOps continuous delivery pipeline platform, built on these standards, can significantly improve quality and efficiency, making enterprises more agile and competitive.

On July 28, 2022, the China Information and Communication Research Institute announced the latest batch of DevOps system and tool standard evaluation results.

Zhaotai Securities Co., Ltd. (formerly Qilu Securities) participated with its "Bee‑Bird Performance Platform" project, which successfully passed the institute's "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" system and tool technical requirements assessment. Its release management module achieved an excellent rating, indicating that Zhaotai Securities' DevOps system and tools are among the domestic leaders.

-Q&A-

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

Zhaotai Securities, a large listed securities broker founded in May 2001, operates in 28 provinces with over 9,000 employees and offers a comprehensive suite of securities, futures, and fund services.

The "Bee‑Bird Performance Platform" is an internally developed infrastructure project guided by DevOps principles and tailored to securities industry security and compliance needs. It integrates multi‑environment CI/CD, code quality checks, automated testing, release approvals, performance tracking, and reporting, enabling rapid, high‑quality delivery and supporting the company's digital transformation.

Q: How do you feel about passing the DevOps system and tool standards assessment?

We are delighted that our platform passed the release management module assessment. Since its launch in early 2019, it has completed over 300,000 CI/CD runs, automating the entire release process, reducing manual effort, and improving deployment efficiency by more than tenfold. We have also incorporated DevSecOps, integrating security tools into the pipeline to shift security left and ensure safety without sacrificing speed.

Q: What considerations led your company to participate in this assessment?

We aimed to identify and improve shortcomings in our tool platform, standardize development and release processes, enhance operational stability, and foster a DevOps culture that promotes collaboration among development, testing, and operations.

Q: What changes resulted from the assessment?

The assessment promoted agile transformation, standardized processes, visualized performance metrics, and reinforced our DevOps ecosystem, thereby accelerating business value delivery and improving IT responsiveness.

Q: What challenges did you encounter during the assessment and how were they solved?

We faced limited reference material and tight timelines. Through extensive research, testing, and iterative improvements, we aligned our platform with the assessment criteria and achieved an excellent rating.

Q: What value has the assessment brought to your R&D?

It has standardized processes, ensured security and compliance, shortened development cycles, reduced testing time via automation, and cut down manpower costs, saving roughly 20 person‑years of testing effort annually.

Q: How important is release management in end‑to‑end value delivery?

Release management is critical for maintaining service continuity. Our platform now supports gray‑scale releases such as canary and blue‑green deployments, with automated health checks and rollback capabilities to minimize business impact.

Q: What are the next steps for DevOps at Zhaotai Securities?

We plan to optimize pipelines, integrate security tools throughout the development lifecycle, and introduce chaos engineering to enhance system stability.

Q: What is your view on the future development of DevOps?

DevOps will increasingly intertwine with development efficiency, cloud‑native adoption, and the full software lifecycle, becoming essential for digital transformation across industries.

Statistics: As of the reporting date, 56 leading enterprises across various sectors have submitted 149 projects for DevOps capability maturity assessment, including major banks, internet firms, securities, insurance, and telecom companies.

The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" standards, led by the China Information and Communication Research Institute and supported by industry leaders, are the most comprehensive and authoritative DevOps standards in China, recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by numerous enterprises.

For inquiries about the DevOps standards assessment, contact the China Information and Communication Research Institute (Liu Kailin, phone 156‑5078‑6171, email [email protected]) or the Efficient Operations Community (Wei Huanxin, phone 185‑0025‑5645, email [email protected]).