Financial Services: Challenges and Solutions
Financial Services firms are under increasing pressure to grow revenue and market share amidst intense competition, regulatory requirements, a rise in corporate governance standards and investor expectations with a continued need for enterprise risk management. At the same time customers are struggling to lower the total cost of ownership of resources, increase operating efficiency — and be faster, more agile and adaptive to changing business demands.
Often, these firms will strategically position service centers or branches in remote or rural areas to better service customers. This remote and distributed service architecture requires a reliable and scalable IP network; thus the basis of these networks; DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (IPAM) is of paramount importance. Financial services firms are focused on driving service through technology by offering remote branch services, mobile applications, advanced-function automated teller machines, wireless networking and internet driven transaction management. The traditional approach of using outdated and vulnerable servers running BIND and DHCP doesn’t cut it anymore. Financial services live and die by the resiliency of their IP networks thus a new approach to securing the networks availability and scale is required.
The financial services industry spends over $400 billion on IT spending worldwide (Gartner Dataquest — July 2005). The most-successful financial services firms are focused on demonstrating customer responsiveness, flexibility and overall management of the customer experience. Having an effective network strategy in place helps financial services organizations to continue to be customer-focused, increase profitability, reduce total cost of ownership.
Industry Challenges
- Focus on finding new ways to service customers using web-based banking and trading.
- Deployment and management of new wireless technologies to service customers in the field and overcome structural limitations of wire line networks.
- Adoption of new technologies to reduce costs and improve customer touch (E.g. VoIP and deployment of Wireless computing platforms).
- Quality of Service and Service Availability (SLA’s) are a top priority for financial institutions — Organizations can not afford to have a network outage.
- Industry deregulation is enabling new competitors to enter the market
- Provide seamless access to product portfolios for alternative distribution channels
- Deploy secure networking technology to ensure privacy protection, compliance with corporate and government governance standards.
The BlueCat Advantage
Move your IP network to a highly-scalable, reliable and resilient network architecture with BlueCat Networks award winning line of Adonis DNS/DHCP and Proteus IPAM appliances. BlueCat’s purpose-built appliance solutions are designed to provide maximum scalability and reliability without compromise to ease-of-use or security.
BlueCat’s IP infrastructure appliances are a logical extension of your network. BlueCat Networks solutions are designed to help financial services organizations improve customer responsiveness, decreases costs and improve competitive advantage. In fact, BlueCat Solutions typically offer a payback period of less than 3 ½ months with a return on investment of over 380%.
Increase Revenue
Built with security in mind, all Adonis and Proteus appliances are based on firewall-grade operating systems, have built in high availability and protection against pharming, DoS and other zero-day exploits. This means your company’s network risk is substantially lowered and your organization can focus on driving new ways to deliver products to market and better service customers, not manage the network.
Decrease Costs
All BlueCat Networks solutions are designed to reduce the time required to manage complex network topologies. Whether your network is IPv4 or IPv6, wired or wireless, BlueCat solutions provide intuitive command and control for your IP networks. With smart features like configuration and deployment wizards, built in error checking and one-to-many deployment, BlueCat appliances will dramatically lower your total cost of ownership. In the first year of ownership, the Adonis™’s total cost is less than half of the total cost of competing solutions.
Gain Competitive Advantage
With BlueCat Adonis and Proteus solutions, your organization can easily scale to manage millions of IP addresses with hundreds of concurrent administrators. This means that regardless of your organizations size, BlueCat has a solution that will help you speed time to market and guarantee the availability of your mission critical applications. Spend less time tracking the allocation of scarce IP addresses, managing DNS and DHCP; spend more time servicing your customers.
First Command
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Adonis Enables First Command to Take Back Control of Its Network
Acting on a deep desire to help America’s military families effectively plan for their financial futures, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Carroll H. Payne laid the groundwork in 1958 for First Command Financial Services. A Registered Investment Adviser firm, First Command today serves nearly 300,000 clients from all walks of life, developing and delivering comprehensive financial plans to assist clients in their efforts to build wealth, reduce debt and pursue their lifetime financial goals and dreams.
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E-Trade
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E*Trade Australia Trades Up to Adonis
As part of the E*Trade Group, E*Trade Australia is a pioneering organization in the area of online trading. In their business, they offer Australian traders the ability to access foreign markets through a secure, personalized trading environment. E*Trade Australia seeks to provide investors with “an unprecedented combination of tools and information as well as the ability to place buy and sell orders via the Internet.” As a Senior Network Administrator at E*Trade Australia, Glen Peake and the Information Technology team are responsible for making sure that the trading services are always available to clients. With four domains to maintain, DNS servers provide access to trading services and to email. Mr. Peake emphasizes the importance of DNS to their business, saying, “This website is the primary source of income to the company so it is vital that DNS records are available and accurate.”
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COMSTAR
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COMSTAR Federal Credit Union Appreciates Adonis DNS Appliance as High Availability Solution
COMSTAR Federal Credit Union is “rooted in service”. Established in 1933, COMSTAR FCU provides banking services to over 20,000 members who reside primarily in the Washington DC Metro Area. The 60-person company embodies the financial success they want for their members - in 2004, they achieved over $167 million in assets. COMSTAR FCU offers its members a variety of banking options such as Personal Credit Union, a free Internet-based home banking service that includes a secure browser interface for online bill payments, and serves as an invaluable portal for a host of other account transactions and information. They are a full-service financial institution with a wide array of competitive products and services and sustainability. The company continues to search for ways to serve their members more efficiently through their sponsor affiliations.
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Investor AB
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Investor AB becomes Master of its Domains
Investor AB is the largest industrial holding company in the Nordic region. For almost a century, its business concept has been to build best-in-class companies in sectors where it has a strong knowledge and networking advantage. Investor AB is a leading shareholder in a number of multinational companies, including AstraZeneca, Ericsson and SEB. The company also conducts private equity activities in North America, Europe and Asia. For Stockholm-based Investor AB, its networking advantage is not limited to just people.
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KPMG
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BlueCat Brings DNS Reliability and Resiliency to KPMG’s International Network
KPMG is a global network of professional firms providing national and international organizations with Audit, Tax, and Advisory services. Operating in 144 countries with more than 104,000 professionals working in member firms around the world, KPMG aims to provide clients with a universally consistent set of multidisciplinary financial and accounting services, based on deep industry knowledge. Their history spans three centuries and features a number of high profile amalgamations, eventually leading to the merger of Peat Marwick International and Klynveld Main Goerdeler in 1987,to create KPMG as we know it today.
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