SD-WAN: Financial Industry

Suresh Kumar Vijayen

SD-WAN: Financial Industry

The financial industry is being driven by technology to ensure that processes are more accessible, efficient, and innovative. It is caused by the needs of new-age clients, such as digitization by crypto-currency applications, cashless societies, and remote ATMs. 

To provide high customer satisfaction, many industries, including Financial, are moving toward digital transformation and IR4.0, especially during this pandemic. One area that has usually been ignored or reluctant to change, resulting in poor achievement with the latest strategies, is the own network solution. Here are some typical problems faced by the financial industry with traditional WAN and the latest trends and technology.

  • The vast majority of businesses are moving entirely into the digital space, and this trend is accelerating in a cashless society where everything is expected instantly. Several issues can be solved via cloud-based applications, but this requires vastly improved security. The network connection between the office and the data center or Cloud must be reliable and secure, and the network connection between remote workers must be safe and reliable.
  • For years, MPLS networks have been relied upon to provide low-latency, secure connectivity. MPLS can experience outages even with failover links, which might require up to 30 seconds or more to reconnect. Still, MPLS is not ideally suited for the latest applications and secure messaging systems since more operational platforms move to the cloud.
  • Financial firms must operate with the highest levels of availability and security. Data about clients, their statements, evidence, transactions, and financial records need to be transmitted with great care to avoid a data breach that may be costly regarding revenue and reputation

Migration from a traditional WAN to SD-WAN helps the Financial Industry in many ways, significantly facilitating their operations and achieving organizational goals. Here is how SD-WAN can help financial firms around the world.

  • Network security is of the utmost importance in protecting sensitive financial data. SD-WAN utilizes leading-edge security with Security-as-a-Service (SASE), ensuring the most up-to-date security and protection against current threats are handled without needing a layer managed by the MPLS provider. Through SD-WAN, a zero-trust model, traffic can be encrypted via IPSec and segmented to be separated from non-mission-critical traffic, such as ATMs, trading systems, or other transaction traffic.
  • Financing is an industry with a diverse range of business distribution models which carries complex and delicate networking needs. Considering these factors, even minor disruptions can turn into catastrophes, so any change disrupting the complex dependency chains of a typical institution will not work. The SD-WAN technology offers organizations the best of both worlds regarding leveraging multiple connectivity links simultaneously, a private circuit for applications that require it, and the ability to connect via public networks for tools that are better suited for it. Besides that,  different transport options in geographical locations allow financial firms to combine any of these options into one seamless pipe and provide organizations with a more excellent grasp of their cloud solutions.
  • Now that financial firms host their data in co-located data centers, disaster recovery has become far more seamless. In case of a failure at the primary Data Center, traffic will virtually instantly redirect automatically to the Disaster Recovery hub without manual intervention with SD-WAN technology. As an additional safeguard, should the worst happen at one of the sites, SD-WAN devices can immediately be moved to a new location and deployed within minutes via its Zero Touch capability, depending on the available connectivity and minimal network reconfiguration required.