It is no surprise that across the financial services industry a steady increase in cloud adoption has taken place in recent years. This trend is expected to continue and grow as organizations look to replace aging, traditional technology. For financial organizations, these changes taking place impact both business operations and customers. Banking, commerce, transactions — not to mention all of their corresponding data — are part of this transformation. With all of these changes taking place across the landscape the demands on your network continue to grow exponentially. Your network serves as the cornerstone of your operation, and its performance, security, and flexibility are key factors in an organization’s success or failure. If routing traffic on your network, managing cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, or general cloud connectivity are becoming more difficult for your IT team to manage, you may be ready for a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).
SD-WAN is a powerful networking tool that can help you centrally manage your traffic flow, independent of the underlying hardware on your network. Today’s networks need to scale quickly with minimal impact to access, resiliency and performance.
As organizations continue to move into the cloud this has driven a demand for change, often allowing users to connect easily to applications from multiple devices and operating systems, whenever and wherever they want. These changes have forced many financial services organizations to face challenges to improve their customer experiences. Their existing networks may be strained by increasing services demands, bandwidth, data transfers, and the need to meet evolving regulatory compliance requirements. Legacy networks often lack the capacity and resiliency to overcome changing network needs to ensure both the internal and customer facing experience isn’t impacted. The good news is that deploying a managed SD-WAN solution also has the ability to help drive this type of digital transformation across your organization.
We recently hosted a webinar at 11:11 on the topic of SD-WAN and how it can drive digital transformation, which can often leave organizations nonplussed. Our two panelists — Alex Fuchs, Networking Engineer at Fortinet and Alex Reid, Product Manager here at 11:11 Systems — had an engaging discussion on how utilizing managed SD-WAN as part of your organization’s transformation can assist in managing your path forward.
As our panelists make clear, what this really means is placing the burden of modernizing your network architecture in the hands of managed services partner, which can alleviate undue stress on your internal IT team. An early key takeaway was how important security and networking are still going to be in this new architecture, just as important as they are in traditional environments. That may seem like an obvious answer to some of you out there, but as Alex Fuchs points out, 70% of breach notifications are by third parties. Organizations don’t even uncover these breaches themselves, including their security organization.
To hear all about it directly you can check out the full webinar, Put Cloud in the Fast Lane: Why SD-WAN is your supersonic ticket to digital transformation. Access the webinar at any time with the on-demand version.
Want to read more about SD-WAN and the myriad benefits it can bring to your organization? You can also download our white paper, The Fast Track to the Cloud.
