As financial institutions deepen their adoption of technology, digital transformation in the securities industry is entering a more complex phase - one that demands a systematic, enterprise-wide approach.
With the widespread adoption of cloud computing, microservices, and containers, IT teams now manage far more than physical servers. Their environments span virtual machines, containers, and multi-cloud resources, driving up both scale and operational complexity. Fragmented, labor-intensive operating models can no longer keep pace with business needs. For a newly merged securities firm, integrating two independently operated IT environments - while building a unified, scalable operations architecture - became an immediate management priority.
As the strategic partner for the integrated IT operations platform, CanWay worked with Guolian Minsheng Securities Company Limited (Guolian Minsheng Securities) to drive a structured transformation across two dimensions: platform architecture and team capabilities.
1. Project Background: Fragmented IT Operations Could Not Support Post-Merger Growth
The merger of Guolian Securities and Minsheng Securities was the first securities industry merger and restructuring transaction to pass regulatory review and reach completion after China introduced its new regulation for the capital markets. The transaction is widely regarded in the industry as a representative example of both execution efficiency and implementation stability in the current wave of securities sector consolidation.
The two firms brought highly complementary strengths in both business capabilities and geographic reach. Minsheng Securities had deep expertise in investment banking, while Guolian Securities held strong positions in wealth and asset management. Minsheng Securities had a significant presence in central China, particularly Henan, while Guolian Securities had an established base in Wuxi and southern Jiangsu. Following the merger, the combined business expanded across wealth management, investment banking, asset management, and proprietary trading. This growth also raised the bar for IT resilience and operational management.
At the outset, CanWay and the IT operations team at Guolian Minsheng Securities conducted a joint assessment and identified four interconnected challenges.
1) Fragmented configuration data.
Configuration data was split across two CMDBs, with no unified inventory or complete relationship mapping for assets across five data center locations and both cloud and on-premises environments. This made it difficult to establish a consistent, trusted configuration data foundation for critical use cases such as incident impact analysis and change risk assessment.
2) Inconsistent IT service processes.
The two firms operated separate IT service processes. Incident, change, and resource request workflows were distributed across multiple systems, without a unified service catalog or SLA management framework. As a result, cross-functional collaboration was inefficient and costly.
3) Fragmented monitoring and alerting.
Guolian Minsheng Securities relied on Zabbix and several other tools to collect monitoring data, but lacked centralized governance across alert sources. Duplicate and non-actionable alerts were common, and the organization had no unified mechanism for alert aggregation, correlation analysis, or ticket integration. During incidents, operations teams had to switch between multiple systems, slowing diagnosis and resolution.
4) Limited architectural scalability.
The legacy platform did not support containerized hybrid deployment or cross-data-center disaster recovery. It also lacked compatibility with domestically developed Chinese technology stacks, including Kunpeng and Hygon processors and Kylin operating systems, making it difficult to meet technology autonomy and compliance requirements.
Because these challenges were interconnected, adding more point tools would not solve them individually. The joint assessment led CanWay and Guolian Minsheng Securities to a shared conclusion: the post-merger IT operations environment required holistic architecture planning and systematic implementation.
The transformation covered three layers:
IT operations platform architecture: Defining the technical framework and operating model that support business resilience;
IT Operations team capabilities: Determining how effectively the platform is used and how its capabilities continue to evolve;
System architecture governance and application lifecycle management: Providing management with unified, visual, and standardized governance capabilities.
2.Transformation Roadmap: Building a Unified, Integrated IT Operations Platform
To address these challenges, the two teams established a roadmap built around three principles: unify the core platform, introduce AI continuously, and evolve in stages. Phase one focused on deploying an integrated IT Operations platform, including CMDB , ITSM, Monitoring and Alerting. By integrating data and workflows, the platform creates a foundation of high-quality configuration and observability data for future AI use cases. AI Agents will then be introduced progressively across inspection, diagnosis, automated remediation, and change assistance, followed by human-AI collaboration and FinOps. The iterative architecture also allows new AI capabilities to be incorporated as the technology evolves.
At the architecture level, CanWay designed the integrated CanWay IT Operations environment around two priorities: extensibility and operational resilience. This approach supports long-term evolution while maintaining platform security and reliability.
Layer 1: Extensibility and Technology Autonomy
Through an integrated architecture that connects OneAgent-based data collection, API Gateway, Operations PaaS, and AIDev, the platform can scale flexibly across IT operations use cases. It also enables Guolian Minsheng Securities to iterate independently and extend operational capabilities quickly.
Layer 2: Architectural Resilience and Compliance
Containerized deployment, full-stack compatibility with ITAI, and dual-data-center disaster recovery help ensure stable platform operations while meeting security and compliance requirements.
This phase established the unified platform and its core capabilities, delivering the following outcomes:
1) CMDB
CanWay established a unified configuration management capability through a four-stage maturity model: 1.0 Asset Inventory, 2.0 Data Integration, 3.0 Business Mapping, and 4.0 Digital Map.
Data models and standards: Restructured hardware and software models and defined asset attributes, relationships, and data standards across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS resources.
Automated discovery and unified management: Integrated with container cloud and other platforms through plug-ins to automate the discovery of hardware, software, and cloud resources. More than 60% of configuration data is now collected automatically.
Data governance and operations: Established audit rules for attribute completeness, orphaned configuration items, and relationship integrity; introduced a data quality dashboard; and clarified the responsibilities of configuration managers, service owners, and auditors. Together, these measures continuously improve the accuracy, completeness, and freshness of configuration data.
Design-state management: For complex O32 business environments in the securities industry, the platform supports visual business topology design and comparisons between design and runtime states, enabling a more structured approach to application architecture governance.
Business outcomes: Brought all core system resources across five data center locations under unified management, supporting critical use cases including incident impact analysis, change risk assessment, and asset inventory.
2) ITSM
CanWay reengineered and standardized IT service management processes using five low-code engines for workflows, forms, rules, reports, and views.
Process migration and optimization: Migrated and optimized core processes including resource requests, information system go-live and retirement, and change management. The redesigned workflows align with the post-merger organization and data center resource model.
Service catalog management: Built a tiered service catalog, configured user groups and service entitlements, and introduced SLA metrics to enable end-to-end ticket tracking.
Workflow and configuration integration: Connected ITSM and CMDB within CanWay IT Service Management. Approval workflows can retrieve configuration data automatically, while completed workflows update asset status in the CMDB. Alerts can also generate tickets automatically, creating a closed-loop resolution process.
Omnichannel access: Integrated DingTalk, OA task lists, and WeCom, enabling teams to handle workflows collaboratively from both desktop and mobile devices.
3) Monitoring
CanWay established a unified monitoring framework with consistent standards and capabilities across the combined organization.
Comprehensive monitoring coverage: Extended monitoring across five core categories - hosts, middleware, databases, application processes, and network endpoint availability.
Visual operations: Introduced service dashboards, resource overviews, and topology views that display monitoring coverage by business service and provide an at-a-glance view of service health.
Extensible observability: Reserved extension capabilities for application performance tracing and Logging, laying the groundwork for a unified observability environment.
4) Alerting
CanWay established end-to-end alert lifecycle governance to reduce the operational burden created by large volumes of duplicate and non-actionable alerts.
Multi-source alert integration: Connected six core alert source categories and normalized alert data from more than 20 heterogeneous systems.
Alert analytics and governance: Enriched alert context and applied aggregation, deduplication, suppression, and topology-based correlation to reduce duplicate and non-actionable alerts.
Closed-loop resolution: Enabled alerts to generate and intelligently route tickets automatically, while integrating with CanWay IT Automation Operations to trigger automated remediation. Core metrics including MTTI, MTTA, and MTTR provide measurable visibility into incident response and recovery performance.
Continuous improvement:Established a biweekly alert review process that tracks alert volumes and false-positive rates by business service and vendor, enabling ongoing optimization of monitoring and alerting policies.
3. Building Team Capabilities:
From Experience-Driven Operations to Standardized Engineering
An integrated IT operations transformation requires more than a new platform; it also depends on stronger team capabilities. Aligned with the new platform, CanWay helped Guolian Minsheng Securities define four connected development paths for its operations organization.
Transition to Site Reliability Engineer (SRE): Use CanWay IT Monitoring and Observability capabilities, together with SLO and error budget, to quantify and manage system reliability - shifting the team's focus from reactive incident response to proactive reliability engineering.
Transition to IT Automation Engineer: Use low-code engines and Operations PaaS to turn repetitive tasks into self-service automation tools and workflows.
Transition to AI Agent Engineer: Use CanWay AIDev to encapsulate operational knowledge and troubleshooting experience in intelligent assistants for inspections, alert analysis, and other scenarios, enabling AI Agents to support both analysis and execution.
Transition to FinOps Engineer: Combine CanWay Cloud Management with unified CMDB asset data to integrate capacity and cost information. This creates cost visibility, quota management, and continuous optimization across cloud and on-premises resources - improving utilization without compromising system resilience.
Together, these four development paths are moving the team from task execution toward engineering excellence, AI-enabled operations, and value-driven management.
4. Application Architecture Governance: Unifying Design, Deployment, and Runtime States
Application architecture governance remains an emerging discipline, with no single industry-wide best practice. Building on the integrated IT operations platform, CanWay and Guolian Minsheng Securities are extending their collaboration into this area.
CMDB manages resources and their relationships. ITSM manages service workflows. Monitoring identifies system anomalies. Building on these capabilities, application architecture governance extends visibility to system design, service deployment locations, and deviations between actual runtime states and approved design baselines.
5. Looking Ahead: Moving from Platform Integration Toward Intelligent Operations
Under the joint roadmap, platform value will be assessed through continuous operations and measurable performance indicators.
In the next phase, CanWay will help Guolian Minsheng Securities strengthen its platform operating model. Management dashboards and recurring operational reports will support continuous optimization of foundational IT operations use cases and platform performance. Following the roadmap to unify the core platform, introduce AI continuously, and evolve in stages, the two teams will also integrate large language model capabilities and progressively deploy AI Agents for workflow assistance, monitoring operations, intelligent inspections, and alert analysis - improving operational efficiency and business support.
