Boosting the Availability of Revenue-Generating Financial Services

In any industry, network downtime and performance issues can have a significant cost. But when it comes to financial services, the impact is even more profound, particularly for revenue-generating applications. Financial service firms and their customers rely constantly on these applications. When these applications experience slowdowns or outages, the impact can extend beyond revenue loss and lead to customer dissatisfaction, reduced employee productivity, and potential reputational damage.

Ensuring the availability and optimal performance of network services is a clear priority for financial services organizations, but determining how to achieve these objectives is anything but clear cut. In today's complex and ever-evolving IT landscape, financial services firms rely on dynamic, multi-faceted network delivery paths that involve a range of technologies, third-party vendors, and cloud service providers. These intricacies create blind spots and make it difficult to gain the visibility needed to spot potential issues before they affect users and profits.

A recent survey found that 75% of network operations professionals are encountering blind spots in managing these environments, which means they continue to find out about issues when it’s too late—after users have been affected. EMA researchers found that teams often juggle between six and ten different monitoring tools, creating more confusion. Administrators are left with too many screens and not enough actionable insights. This ultimately lengthens root cause identification, remediation, and resolution times.

In this post, we’ll explore strategies for ensuring the reliability and availability of critical, revenue-generating applications in financial services. This includes both customer-facing apps like online banking and backend applications that support revenue-generating activities, such as apps that run credit checks for online loan applications.

Three key requirements

1. Establish comprehensive, end-to-end visibility

Modern networks continue to grow less and less reliant upon internal infrastructure. Critical services often depend upon a web of interconnected components, including wireless networks, cloud services, third-party vendors, and SD-WAN technologies. To keep financial applications running smoothly, teams need visibility across all these different domains, even when they span multiple technologies, vendors, and cloud environments.

A unified view of this complex infrastructure is crucial. Legacy tools may provide basic up/down visibility on specific devices, but they don't offer the granular insights necessary for identifying and addressing issues in real time. Teams managing business-critical apps need active testing that ties together data from various tools and resources, and offers hop-by-hop visibility into any given network path.

The key to reducing administrative overhead and costs lies in minimizing reliance on disparate, point-based tools. Instead, teams need to establish centralized visibility across the full network ecosystem. This unified approach helps cut down on inefficiencies and reduces the time it takes to identify and solve problems.

2. Gain insights to speed root cause analysis

One of the most challenging aspects of managing network performance in modern environments is the increasing reliance on third-party providers. As more services move to the cloud and rely on ISPs, the portion of the network controlled by internal IT teams continues to decrease. This leaves network teams without the full context of performance across the entire delivery path.

Using multiple, disjointed tools, teams often lack critical pieces of information and must sift through data scattered across different systems. This makes root cause analysis slow and inefficient, prolonging the process of problem identification and resolution.
To address this, teams need real-time visibility across the entire network delivery path. By accessing targeted, timely insights, they can quickly pinpoint which specific domain an issue is occurring in and why. This proactive approach can significantly speed up root cause analysis and resolution.

3. Leverage application correlation for better troubleshooting

In financial services, a single application or service often depends on a complex network of interconnected apps, APIs, devices, and networks. From the end-user's perspective, they may just see that an app is sluggish or failing to load, but the issue could lie anywhere along the entire network chain—including issues with network devices, apps, or even the last-mile ISP.

To solve this, teams need the ability to correlate application performance with network path performance. By connecting app performance with the underlying network infrastructure, they can identify whether an issue is stemming from an application fault, a network issue, or a third-party provider failure.

Effective application correlation provides the level of detail needed to accurately diagnose issues and resolve them quickly, helping teams provide seamless performance for end users.

The solution: Network Observability by Broadcom

With Network Observability by Broadcom, financial services teams can achieve the unified visibility necessary to optimize the performance and availability of their critical applications. Featuring AppNeta by Broadcom, the platform delivers complete, end-to-end visibility into network delivery paths, encompassing both internally managed infrastructure and networks operated by third parties, including ISPs and cloud providers.

With the platform's powerful insights and real-time analytics, teams can eliminate blind spots and proactively manage network performance, so their revenue-generating apps remain highly available and responsive.

Real-world example: How FIS benefited from network observability

FIS, a global leader in financial technology, serves 95% of the world’s leading banks and more than one million clients. To enhance their network visibility and troubleshooting capabilities, FIS’s network operations team implemented Network Observability by Broadcom, and they saw immediate results. Following are a few examples.

Example 1: Diagnosing network device issues

A problem arose with a Cisco networking device, but the device failed to write the error to logs. Without proper visibility, pinpointing the root cause would have been time-consuming and challenging. However, with AppNeta, FIS’s team could immediately identify the problematic device, enabling swift resolution.

Example 2: Resolving data loss with precision

In another instance, an issue with a Cisco switch was causing data loss. With AppNeta, the team was able to leverage a data loss report and rapidly identify the culprit. Instead of relying on the vendor to perform root cause analysis and remediation, FIS’s team could provide targeted, actionable intelligence to the vendor, accelerating the issue resolution process.

Example 3: Helping a client resolve performance issues

When a client reported slow performance and timeouts, FIS installed AppNeta at the client’s site to monitor the issue. The team quickly discovered the root cause: a misconfigured F5 load balancer at the client’s location. While FIS infrastructure wasn’t responsible for the problem, this intelligence was invaluable to the customer. In this way, FIS could help their client address the issue, so they could enjoy better service levels. This helped strengthen the customer’s loyalty to FIS.

Conclusion

Network reliability and performance are essential for the success of financial services firms. To maintain uninterrupted service, teams need comprehensive visibility, fast root cause analysis, and effective application correlation.  

With Network Observability by Broadcom, teams can streamline their operations and speed issue identification and resolution—ultimately improving both operational performance and customer satisfaction. As financial services firms continue to evolve and rely more heavily on third-party providers, achieving true end-to-end network visibility is no longer optional—it’s a necessity for sustaining business-critical applications and meeting customer expectations.

To learn more, be sure to view our recent Small Bytes webcast, Solve Network Issues for Revenue-Generating Financial Services. In addition, see our blog post and case study to  learn more about how FIS has benefited from using Network Observability by Broadcom.