Morningstar Retirement Fiduciary Services Empowers Investors with Automated DevOps Test Data Management

Easing Fiduciary Risk

Morningstar Retirement’s Fiduciary Services helps its clients reduce fiduciary risk and holds the responsibility of building retirement plan lineups as a 3(21) Service. Morningstar Retirement ingests terabytes of customer data to deliver its services and provide monthly reporting to its clients. Morningstar Retirement’s development team employs Agile and DevOps methodologies and uses tools such as Terraform and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Development Kit (CDK) within its development processes.

Challenges with Quality and Compliance

Over the past few years, the Morningstar Retirement Fiduciary Services development team faced some data quality-related challenges that impacted the production environment. In trying to rectify these data issues, the team encountered difficulties with replicating data quality problems within its non-production environments, impacting its ability to improve software quality. The problem centered on Morningstar Retirement Fiduciary Services’ inability to efficiently obtain production-like test data within non-production environments in a timely manner. Refreshing production data to lower environments took longer than ideal to complete.

Morningstar Retirement needed to ensure that its production and non-production data was secure, masked, and compliant with SOC 2 requirements, as the firm’s contractual obligations to clients require a high degree of data security. The result was a lengthy process for handling testing and quality control of software defects within its lower environments.

“Overall, the teams were not happy with the current situation. They couldn’t create test cases based on the existing data, and creating test data using financial data is extremely complex,” said Parina Chhibber, Director of Software Engineering at Morningstar Retirement.

Automating DevOps Test Data Management and Data Delivery with Delphix

Morningstar Retirement Fiduciary Services selected Delphix to automate its DevOps test data management processes, including copying data from its production environments to its development and test environments while also masking the test data for compliance and privacy purposes. Delphix replaces custom scripts to copy production data and fully automates the data copying process. Delphix also provided an integrated approach to masking data and complying with SOC 2 requirements.

The Delphix Data Platform works by first synchronizing and compressing data from Morningstar’s production database in AWS to create an immutable data source. This data source is frequently synchronized with production so that the Morningstar Retirement team has a virtual time machine of its production data using a Delphix feature called Timeflow. In doing so, the team can create virtual snapshots of its data at nearly any point in time to facilitate testing different versions of software and troubleshooting issues that occur in production or test environments.

From the synchronized data source, the team uses Delphix to create virtual test databases (VDBs) for its developers and testers, based on their specific needs. Any sensitive data in each VDB is automatically masked according to Morningstar’s policies, so that data owners, developers, and testers have much less worry about their non-production environments.

The Morningstar team completely automates the processes of synchronizing Delphix with production data, spinning up VDBs for development teams, refreshing those VDBs when needed, and tearing them down to free up infrastructure resources. These processes are also integrated with their DevOps toolchain, so team members continue to use familiar tools and procedures.

“Migrating data from production to the lower environments is often a time-consuming, error-prone process,” said Bala Mukund, Director of Technology at Morningstar Retirement. “Delphix works for us because it helps us do that work in a much simpler fashion.”

Reducing Resources and Improving Quality

Implementing Delphix reduced the number of resources required to refresh production data. Delphix also reduced the monthly number of hours required for data provisioning by 70%.

By reducing the time spent on test data management, Delphix has allowed Morningstar Retirement’s quality assurance (QA) team members to focus on improving security testing, increasing test data coverage in automated tests, and analyzing more advanced data requirements. Meanwhile, their developers can spend more time on developing new features and improving security.

Morningstar Retirement has also improved quality as the result of implementing Delphix. By streamlining test data provisioning for the team’s developers, Delphix helped the development team shift left quality, detecting and correcting software defects during the development or unit testing stage, much earlier in the development lifecycle than before.

“We’ve seen data issues in the production environment that lead to bugs,” said Mukund. “The benefit of Delphix is that now we are able to identify errors ahead of time so that we don't experience them in our production environment.”

Based on the successful implementation within Fiduciary Services, Morningstar Retirement has adopted Delphix in another area of their business unit.

“Delphix has enabled us to improve quality, reduce costs, and free up developers and testers to be more productive,” said Chhibber. “We look forward to applying Delphix to other areas within Morningstar to replicate the same results.”

About Morningstar Retirement (US)

Morningstar Retirement empowers investor success by providing research- and technology-driven products and services that help individuals reach their retirement goals. With advisory services provided by Morningstar Investment Management LLC, Morningstar Retirement supports and collaborates with workplace retirement plans and other industry players to differentiate their services, stay competitive, and reach new markets, all in service of building a better retirement system. Morningstar Retirement not only helps people save for the retirement they want but helps them make their money last once they get there.