Today’s Bank WAN: How to Cost-Effectively and Efficiently Connect Branches

Today’s bank IT network and operations managers are increasingly focused on their WAN communication infrastructure. Banks with multiple branches continue to struggle with efficient and cost effective methods for electronically moving and sharing data between each location. With this function becoming a necessary tool in performing day-to-day operations, bankers are focused on improving their understanding of network options and how to enhance network performance to ensure a positive experience.

Banking applications are becoming more robust and data hungry, resulting in the need for increased speed and reliability when transferring data through the WAN. Many banks today are in an either/or scenario when evaluating options to improve their WAN performance. They are forced into implementing a private circuit (T-1) architecture that offers reliability at a high cost. This makes T-1 infrastructure an ideal option for the primary connection but an expensive and often impractical solution for redundancy.

 

The alternative is to utilize broadband Internet solutions which offers faster data communication speeds at a lower cost, but can also suffer from frequent outages, lack of visibility, oversubscription and non-existent or weak SLAs. Additionally, passing data over an insecure medium such as the Internet requires an overlaying secure communication element such as a VPN that must be setup and maintained by internal staff. These challenges have been enough for most financial institutions to avoid using broadband for their primary connectivity option.

Banks require a solution that provides the flexibility to securely connect users and branches via a reliable, cost-effective method. Implementing a virtual overlay, or WAN fabric in data centers and branch offices, unifies the network by deploying a hybrid WAN using multiple types of network connectivity, including MPLS, cable, DSL and LTE. This WAN optimization solution aggregates constantly changing information about the traffic on the Internet and then uses this information to route traffic and data over the optimal secure path. This provides your bank with a means to monitor and control network connectivity while ensuring consistent performance in a cost-effective manner.

This new approach to wide area networking, which moves beyond WAN optimization, provides banks with a complete map of the network and applies dynamic path selection and intelligence to help IT network managers see, control and optimize their network connectivity.

A WAN overlay solution combines unique communications technology with:

• Dynamic Intelligent Path Selection
• WAN Acceleration
• Data Reduction
• Path Conditioning
• Traffic Shaping
• Global Visibility

Safe Systems new WANworks solution gives financial institutions the flexibility to securely connect their users to bank applications via the most cost-effective source of connectivity and cost-effectively and securely connect all branches. For more information about this solution, visit our WAN Communication page.