Understanding the Needs of Today's Financial Networks

Good Decisions Reduce Risk 

The financial industry is at the forefront of network technology. The traditional image of bankers and financial traders is really an anachronism. The reality is that the financial industry, from retail banking to high speed trading, is at the cutting edge of network innovation – for better or for worse. Whether adopting new technologies to allow customers broad-based mobile access, squeezing out the last few nanoseconds of latency, or providing air-tight security, network and IT leaders are always looking for newer and better advantages.

New technology has pitfalls as well. Like the popular image of the banker, the gunwielding bank robber is equally anachronistic. Bank robbing is now an ultrasophisticated cybercrime, where highly-organized syndicates leverage their own technology and the ever-growing complexity of networks to their advantage. Sophisticated network equipment and topologies can lead to complex and slow faultfinding processes and times.

Good decisions require good data

These factors place enormous pressure on network and IT groups, who face growing difficulties due to:

• Increasing technical complexity.

• Increasing rates of technology change and adoption 

• Increased frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks

• Increased pressure to make the right technology “bets” 

• Increased expectations from users (and investors) for access and quality of experience 

• Increased instances of performance, stability, and security issues (often found festering in “blind spots”) 

As any trader will tell you, you can’t completely eliminate risk. But you can greatly mitigate it by having the best possible information – better data yields better decisions. With better information you can:

• Legitimize vendor claims so you can make the right technology bets 

• Optimize technology roll outs, application performance, and network availability. 

• Take the guesswork out of network security performance and resilience. 

• Elimtinate blind spots in the network by implementing end-to-end visibility 

• Provide operators with actionable insight by maximizing the use of network tools.

The combination of Keysight’s network testing and network visibility solutions provides a unique network partner that can ensure your financial network at all stages – from design, to deployment, to production.

Legitimize Vendor Claims

Data sheets can lie

Most vendors are not dishonest, but their goal is to get you buy their solutions rather than those of their competitors. So it’s no surprise that they “accentuate the positive” and present the best-case scenario for a product’s functionality, performance, and stability. 

Most IT departments that are evaluating solutions attempt to mitigate “best-case promises” through live demonstrations and proof-of-concept tests. However, these evaluations are often limited in scope and rarely provide anything approaching a real world assessment. The  fact that they are done in isolation and under vendor control often means they won’t accurately emulate the complex interactions with other devices, systems, and users that you find in a “live” network.

Further, these evaluations rarely provide a true “apples to apples” comparison among multiple vendors. It is difficult to get a vendor to give up the necessary control in order to fully test their product – in unpredictable conditions, with unforeseen traffic patterns and types, and while under attack from malicious software. 

What all of this means is that the data available for making networking decisions is often suboptimal – a risky proposition for such a high-stakes bet.