Enhancing Internet Performance for the Financial Services Customers - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India & SAARC, NETSCOUT

Since a very long time, the internet has been delivering a profound impact on the financial services industry. With internet being the provider of the online, digital network to communicate, has many other benefits as well that have huge financial implications. The rapid commercialisation of the internet is fueled by increase in ISPs for businesses.  This has brought about dramatic changes in the cost and other shifts in the marketing and distribution of financial products and services. Serving customers online, via the internet, is also more convenient besides saving resources. 

In the recent past, with the pandemic accelerating large-scale digital transformation in the financial services sector among other industries, it has led to further changes in the business operations. 

Digital transformation is making the best use of the internet to deliver services and make them more efficient by leveraging disruptive technologies, across the government, commercial, enterprises and service provider networks. New-age technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Internet of Things, Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, among others, are enabling Financial Services organisations to overhaul their operations and discover innovative ways through online channels to serve customers. The performance of the internet is crucial and any disturbances that impacts its performance has to be dealt with by leveraging the appropriate solutions.

Let us take the case of a global organisation in the Financial Services space and how the challenges it faced with its internet usage was addressed. The organisation’s IT infrastructure and network projects, prior and during the Covid-19 phase, successfully supported the growing online transactions. Smooth operations of the hybrid workforce as well as employee productivity were accomplished.  However, the increase in the financial processing volumes coupled with the organisation’s own business growth was taxing the front door of their internet presence, limiting their ability to provide value-added services to global customers. There was an immediate requirement for a larger internet architecture enhancement, which included re-working and relocating their primary internet circuits, an increased reliance on Equinix Co-Lo Data Centre Services and a new 100 GB backbone between their main data centres. 

With Service Assurance facilitated by nGeniusONE real-time monitoring and use of well-established workflows, a highly strategic visibility into critical Internet infrastructure segments necessary for reliable performance was provided. The network environment was upgraded to 100GB speeds for the Internet links at the network edge and deployment of software-based NETSCOUT Certified InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) 9800 series appliances for Smart Edge Monitoring was done. Production-level ISNG were repurposed to additional locations to expand visibility across other 10GB network segments. nGenius Packet Flow Switches (PFS) were used to distribute network packet traffic on 100 GB segment to downstream devices including ISNG appliances.

NETSCOUT was able to successfully deliver a viable internet upgrade plan for maintaining performance through the expanded deployment of software-based ISNG appliances and PFS brokers. PFS technology simplifies and grows the business visibility architecture on demand. It can quickly scale deployment with self-healing, intelligent, self-organising mesh technology.

With the addition of ISNG appliance at the high-speed internet access points, it provided the financial services organisation with the advantages of the Smart Edge Monitoring solution for not only the visibility at the key network edges but also an in-depth, real-time analysis and workflows to tackle potential disruptions at the front door of their internet presence.

This improved the internet processing capacity and led to further financial growth and business expansion.

Today, in every industry, internet performance is imperative. For the financial services sector, every hour is a business hour, as large volumes of data processing are done after office hours.

These organisations rely on cloud-based solutions and online platforms, for all their activities, from business operations to customer experience, hence a high performing internet becomes the key factor.