Although IT has been a vital component in the banking and finance industry since the 1950s and 60s, the role of IT in banking has shifted radically with the advent of digital transformation in the recent years. A study conducted by the World Bank in 2022 concluded that two-thirds of adults worldwide make or receive digital payments.
Digital banking operations simplified financial management and banking access to millions of people and opened up new markets for traditional and emerging players in the BFSI industry. But it also posed a unique set of challenges to the teams managing the IT infrastructure.
User digital experience has become more critical than ever. Digital interfaces like applications, web-portals, and specialized software used in bank branches play major roles in a user's journey with their banks. Any downtime, lapse in service quality, or inefficiency can cause losses in revenue, reputation, and hefty regulatory fines.
Banking IT teams use siloed IT tools to monitor different parts of their infrastructure and address the challenges mentioned above. Specialized IT tools are siloed and do not integrate effectively with each other. When there are 20 to 30 siloed IT tools, they affect event correlation, limit context, and affect inter-team coordination. A unified IT management tool with powerful integrations can simplify IT monitoring for banking and finance IT teams.
OpManager enables IT teams to cut down the time and effort required to detect, diagnose, and resolve network issues in banking IT infrastructure with extensive network visibility, context-rich alarms, AI-driven monitoring, and automated incident response. Whether it's a network-side issue, server malfunction, faulty configuration push, or an external attack, OpManager provides metrics and insights required to correlate events and track down the root cause. In-addition to network-layer visibility, OpManager's add-ons and plugins also extend it's scope across the IT stack and help manage application architectures from the top-down.
Track the uptime of critical devices, interfaces, processes, services, and websites with monitoring, notifications, reports, and dashboards.
Monitor storage devices, disks, and LUNs for health and performance and track storage capacity with utilization reports, usage forecasts, capacity planning reports, etc.
Monitor traffic utilization for devices and interfaces and set alarms for abnormal traffic usage. Detect congestion proactively by monitoring packet loss, response times, round-trip time, etc.
Get visibility into the hardware health of IT infrastructure devices by monitoring hardware sensors, system temperature, power supply units, etc.
IT teams need more than just network visibility to ensure a seamless digital user experience. In addition to network performance and IT infrastructure monitoring, IT teams can enable OpManager's in-product add-ons and plugins to perform additional functionalities within the same interface.
At its full extent, OpManager equips banking IT teams with full-stack observability: improving correlation, context, and control over their IT infrastructure
Monitor banking applications and websites to detect slow response times and outages. IT teams can keep tabs on user experience scores, monitor synthetic transactions, and measure website and application performance across multiple locations and browsers to ensure quality of service for all users.
IT teams can also monitor the underlying application codes and database queries to narrow down the cause of application issues. This includes visibility into errors and exceptions, slow running queries, break down by response time for various components, application service maps, etc.
OpManager monitors the network for compliance with popular standards like SOX, PCI DSS, and GDPR, as well as custom compliance standards to detect violations. OpManager also detects the latest firmware vulnerabilities and lists their CVE IDs, impacts, and severities from the NIST website.
OpManager enables IT teams to maintain control over network configurations with its change management features. IT teams can keep track of configurations, set baselines, automate change detection, schedule backups, audit configuration changes, track down config changes etc. In case of any major outage, banking services can be restored by reverting to the baseline.
OpManager bolsters existing security tools with firewall log analysis, VPN monitoring, firewall policy optimization, internet activity monitoring, ARP spoofing detection, deep packet inspection, and rogue device detection. IT teams can also manage their IP subnets, IP addresses, DHCP servers, and switch-ports with OpManager to get a greater degree of control over their IT infrastructure.
OpManager provides visibility into traffic patterns and bandwidth utilization statistics with insights into the source, destination, application, and interfaces. You can detect bandwidth hogging applications, prioritize critical services, and shape traffic to ensure optimal bandwidth utilization. IT teams can also use AI to get alerted for traffic anomalies or abnormal events.
In the past decade, the banking and finance industry has experienced a fundamental shift. The perspective of a bank as a "brick-and-mortar" institution is challenged by a new, digital vision. In the 2020's, digital banking and FinTechs are part of daily life, and online payments have taken over cash—and sometimes even credit cards—as the payment of choice.
In this new, uncharted territory, regulatory authorities are developing a framework of legal measures and safety standards to prevent profiteering, disruption, and exploitation. Since banking is one of the few industries that can influence the fates of entire nations and people alike, this is an important endeavor.
Choosing a monitoring solution like OpManager gives banks the best chance at navigating this transformative period and emerge successful, relevant, and beneficial to their communities.
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