Financial Services Solutions
Ensure network availability of all critical activities and improve risk managementData is a new asset
Risk management, regulatory and financial compliance, cost-effectiveness, capabilities, and the delivery of market insights are some of the traditional challenges each financial services provider must face. However, new digital transformation layers — like technological disruption (namely DLT — distributed ledger technology), APIs (application programming interfaces), AI (artificial intelligence), the emergence of cryptocurrencies, the growth of data as a service (DaaS) — lead to major industry changes, but also new and unique risks, which all financial services providers need to be aware of.
In this scenario, risk management means secure data management, as data is the core asset of all critical activities for the financial services sector. Data must be reliable and fast, especially if stock trading or any other financial transactions are involved. Data must be streamed and aggregated in a secure network to avoid outages and to be compliant with new financial regulations. Data must be protected against the risk of cyber threats causing data breaches or even network disruptions. Monitoring the flow of data accessing the network at packet level is therefore extremely important. Dropped packets can lead to errors, incorrect trades, and even compliance issues.
Monitoring financial services network infrastructures provides its own set of challenges:
- Achieving real-time network monitoring
- Financial latency monitoring
- Detecting networking and operational issues before they cause downtime
- Preventing unplanned downtime due to equipment failure
- Remote access control
- Remote troubleshooting (intermittent) issues on hard to reach locations
Maintain high network quality and low levels of latency
Finance and banking network system architectures must also face a particular challenge: latency. One of the essential factors of system and network performance, latency indicates how quickly a user can get a response after sending out a request. When business trades and banking operations are executed online, lower latency means more revenues, especially for companies which adopt high frequency trading to earn profit. Nowadays, the volume of data that needs to be analyzed at high speed is immense, about 30 billion events in a single regular day, according to FINRA, and up to 75 billion operations on special days. This volume of data, also known as “big data problem”, means that the collected data sets are becoming too large and complex to be processed up to speed via traditional data processing applications or for a traditional network system architecture. And in banking, old data are useless data, substantiating the importance of maintaining low levels of latency together with a reliable and stable network on which to base its operations.
A multi-level network system solution approach will help in achieving more fast and intelligent trading, helping to gain a great competitive advantage. Where to start?
Accessing the network traffic
Get a reliable, real-time overview of the network with physical and virtual TAPs placed at strategic points, and Bypass TAPs for an extra layer of security.
Managing & optimizing data flow
Build a visibility architecture with the help of Network Packet Brokers (NPB) to deliver actionable network data to monitoring and security tools.
Data capture and analysis
Leave no blind spots: get dedicated tools that enable monitoring on the spot, but also remotely, as well as back-in-time analysis. In particular, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) allows drilling down into the metadata extracted from network packets to identify what protocols and applications are being used, who is using them, and from what devices. With this level of network traffic analysis, it is possible to detect the actual packets involved in client conversations and identify the root cause of technical or security issues.
Real-time network monitoring starts with high-quality infrastructures. Discover the Profitap portfolio, or request a quote for customized financial services network monitoring infrastructure solutions.