Information technology has become an important business resource. Banking and finance is one of the sectors most affected by its development, with the introduction of new markets, goods, services, and delivery methods. Internet banking, mobile banking, and online electronics banking are a few examples of this shift. Information technology is critical, and the absence of it can lead to poor decisions and ultimately business failure.
Today's banking has moved from a manual, scale-constrained environment to a worldwide banking presence with automated systems and procedures. There's nearly no need to visit a branch these days, thanks to ATMs, mobile banking, and online bill payment services for vendors and utility service providers. Branches are evolving from being places where bankers and tellers foster relationships with customers and the wider community, to sites that provide quick and often automated transactions. As a result of their increased reliance on technology, banks, insurance firms, and investment banks are adopting stern security measures.
Due to intense competition within the banking and finance industry, the difficulties of meeting customer expectations for mobile access, and federal and state regulatory requirements, banks and financial services face a particular but typical set of IT networking challenges.
Every industry pays a price for downtime, but the financial services sector pays a high price. The financial sector frequently ranks at the top of the "cost per minute" of downtime statistics, and downtime may negatively affect an institution's image as well. This is why fault tolerance and high availability are standards in the financial and IT industries.
The importance of network performance in finance may be best shown by high-frequency trading, where milliseconds may make a difference. However, nearly every part of day-to-day operations increasingly relies on high network performance as well, which is necessary for everything, including video conferencing and customer-facing portals.
Attackers prize financial institutions as high-value targets. Any hack may seriously harm your image over the long run as it degrades the trust your organization was founded on. Government regulation is another foundation for trust in the finance industry. Regulations frequently demand thorough network documentation that is auditable and holds to data security standards. Thus, network security is a primary concern for all IT teams.
Financial services networks contain a wide range of distinct networks dispersed over several sites, including branches, ATMs, corporate data centers, and home offices of remote workers. Even if you construct everything from scratch, monitoring and maintaining all these networks is difficult. Dealing with the diversity brought on by mergers and acquisitions makes it considerably tougher.
Aside from the expense of hardware and bandwidth, administering and monitoring intricate financial networks may be expensive. Although there are specialized tools for various use cases, this results in tool sprawl, which is an ever-expanding collection of unconnected applications that may or may not interface with one another. Plus, the licensing and operating costs of this approach can quickly build up.
In reality, networks for banking and financial services are a web of applications, LANs, WANs, network hardware, and physical locations. Base-lining performance across locations, managing network devices, locating bottlenecks, and going deep when a specific problem has to be debugged can become an impossible task.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and refining the current monitoring approach to solve one issue, frequently results in trade-offs with another (e.g. cost vs. performance).
Making sure your network visibility is broad and deep is the fundamental first step in dealing with the complexity of financial and banking networks. To better grasp what it truly takes to monitor such complicated networks, let's first define the layers involved.
You cannot get deeper network visibility until you have a complete inventory of all the network devices and applications. Every device that connects to the network should be continuously listed by a reliable network asset management technology. Network discovery may assist in maintaining the accuracy of your inventory by using standard network protocols to detect and characterize network devices. Indications like IP address, media access control (MAC) address, model, serial number, software or firmware version, and end-of-support dates should be included, at the very least. Visibility into the rest of your network is built on a foundation of a thorough network asset inventory.
With the help of performance monitoring, you can obtain a precise image of the state of your network (including both recent snapshots and historical performance), from a broad viewpoint, such as bandwidth utilization and throughput, down to specific device metrics. Any number of factors, including missed packets, CPU use, and application-level faults, may be identified using metrics collected via protocols like SNMP, WMI, and syslog.
To retain visibility, automation is essential. Manual network mapping, device discovery, and asset management are feasible but unsustainable. Moreover, manual device inventories and network maps are quickly outdated by modern, dynamic networks. This leads to technical debt, negative feedback loops, and a lack of faith from the finance and IT personnel in the available network documentation.
The relationships between those identified devices at Layers 1, 2, and 3 are visible using network mapping. Fundamentally, network mapping assists you in locating your devices and understanding how they are connected. The map must be live and dynamically updated as devices go online and offline.
The most basic level of network visibility focuses on device connections and data flows. You may gather information from traffic visibility, such as geolocation data for web traffic, and spot unauthorized programmed activity.
OpManager is an efficiently integrated network monitoring solution that simplifies network monitoring for your IT team. This self-guided, easy-to-use software allows you to monitor complex banking and finance solutions as well as conventional network devices effortlessly. Any device that is connected to the network through an IP address is monitored by OpManager via internet standard protocols, like SNMP or WMI. Here are some highlights of its many features to help you decide if OpManager is right for your banking and finance environment.
