Financial

The financial services community is dealing with the need to enhance networks in order to provide improved in-person sales and service while minimizing operational costs. Progressive financial institutions are now looking to reach beyond physical locations to access expertise anywhere across a customer service organization either by voice or video and to deliver new and extended advisory services or product sales offerings to customers.

Retail banks are constantly looking for ways to improve the customer experience. Efforts often include developing new products or services, upgrading existing services, or extending capabilities in existing delivery channels to gain a competitive advantage. The concept of an "intelligent network" is being developed which will provide organizations with enhanced visibility into customer purchasing habits.

Financial intuitions must comply with a variety of regulator mandates. Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm Leach Bliley, PCI, and BASELII all mandate that networks are configured to secure and control access to data. Since there is no easy answer to ensuring customer data is secure throughout its lifecycle, regulatory compliance solutions will continue to be top of mind for customers in the Financial Services market.

Financial institutions that use video for staff communications have already shown that these exchanges are more effective than those conducted using traditional phone calls and e-mail.

The pace of the financial market is such that employees at corporate headquarters must be able to interact in real time with branch offices, advisors, traders, etc. Unified communications technologies provide the means for employees to instantly communicate and have immediate access to market data and the customer account and portfolio status employees need to make informed financial decisions.

Problems resulting from the enormous amounts of data transacted and housed by companies in the financial services sector are compounded by the fact that vast amounts of computing power goes to waste. Server utilization is well under 25 percent for many companies, while as much as 40 percent of total server ownership costs can be consumed by inefficiencies. Consolidating server resources by virtualizing the data center has emerged as the most promising technology to reduce costs and enhance flexibility of operations in the financial services sector.

The typical financial services data center environment supports two to three parallel networks: one for data, one for storage, and possibly one for server clustering. In addition, servers often have dedicated interfaces for management, security, backup, or virtual machine live migration. Supporting these interfaces and systems imposes significant costs related to management, interfaces, cabling, rack space, upstream switches, power and cooling. The move toward an integrated and unified infrastructure (fabric) enables the financial services customer to reduce costs by implementing virtualized systems that are based on an integrated, cost effective and more unified WAN, LAN, and SAN infrastructure.

Speed and responsiveness matters in the financial services business and the ability to rapidly process transactions or respond to inquiries or changes in the market can be the key to success. Due to skyrocketing quantities of customer and market data, the data center must be increasingly responsive to the need for rapid updates. The data center must support internal transaction requests, and aggregate and correlate structured and unstructured data to provide insight into the market that impacts its customers and portfolios. These demands for advanced data analytics will drive advancements in server infrastructure and virtualization, power utilization, storage and security.

Data in a financial institution can include a customer's banking or investment information, in addition to personal data, such as social security numbers and tax history. Securing this information to meet regulatory mandates has become a high priority in the financial services industry.

Securing data as it is moving to and from a financial institution is required to comply with a number of regulatory mandates (SOX, GLBA, BASEL II). It is also a shield to protect against malicious external and internal threats. VPN solutions meet a variety of securing needs, including the most popular: SSL and IPSec.

Identity theft, selling sensitive technical or financial information to a competitor, or disparaging a corporate brand are just some of the ways that hackers can profit from proprietary financial services information. DLP solutions can monitor network activity and data use, and prevent users from transmitting or copying data.

Wireless solutions and devices provide financial professionals with the ability to extend the benefits of a messaging and collaboration environment to mobile professionals. These solutions provide push-based access to: email, calendars, contacts, tasks and notes, instant messaging, web-based applications and services, and enterprise applications all from a remote location.

As new types of services built with rich-content and multimedia are deployed, the underlying infrastructure must allow access to and from any device. VoWLAN (Voice Over Wireless LAN) and FMC promises end-users ubiquitous access to voice, video and data services on any mobile devices by converging fixed and mobile networks.

The need to secure sensitive credit card information and prevent unauthorized access to the wireless network is mandated as part of compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard. Any company that stores, processes, or transmits credit card information is required to comply with PCI. The PCI standard was created by major credit card companies Visa and MasterCard. These companies have specific programs, such as Visa Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP) and MasterCard Site Data Protection (SDP) service, which are based on the PCI standard. Other credit card companies, such as American Express and Discover have adopted the PCI Data Security Standard as well.