On 28 June, multiple big-name banks across the UK were hit with an outage, leaving many customers unable to access their funds. HSBC, Virgin Money, Lloyds Bank, Barclays and Nationwide, all set out to uncover if they had been a victim of a cyberattack or simply faced issues with computer servers.
Cloud and the internet are integral to powering the enterprise network for applications and services in the financial sector. Therefore, when an outage occurs, it feels like the entire system comes to a halt, consequently calling the firm’s reputation into question.
Trust is fundamental for financial institutions, and visibility is essential for trust. This is why organisations need a solution that can offer full visibility into the service delivery chain of their most critical applications, services and websites explains Sofie Feeney, regional lead for EMEA North at Cisco ThousandEyes, the cybersecurity firm.
In financial services, consistent uptime builds consumer trust
In today’s digital economy, outages are unavoidable and we read about them in the news all the time. While they’re always a hassle and sometimes highly disruptive, outages in the financial services industry hit differently. Consumers rely on banking apps and online services to make payments, transfer funds, manage a mortgage, trade, invest, and more. These are time-sensitive activities and any disruption, be it 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or four hours, can have a significant impact and many follow-on consequences.
It’s no understatement, therefore, to say that minimising downtime and optimising uptime is a matter of building foundational trust with your customers.
There’s nothing new about that concept but what is new, however, is that while more and more customers expect more and more services through more and more digital channels, so too does the financial services industry become more and more vulnerable to outages and disruptions that occur within environments that they don’t own yet rely on to deliver those digital services: the internet and cloud.
You can’t fix what you can’t see
Delivering digital banking and other online financial services today requires IT teams to manage a complex digital supply chain that hinges on a multitude of external components including public and hybrid cloud, SaaS, third-party providers, and the internet itself. Finding the source of any performance and availability issues amidst this maze of internal and external dependencies is a challenging task, to say the least.
The challenge is that traditional monitoring tools can’t identify the problem quickly or provide insights into what’s going on outside an organisation’s four digital walls. You certainly can’t fix what you can’t see so, more often than not, IT teams are left scrambling to troubleshoot the issue.
Understanding the health of the global Internet, customer applications, and everything in between, has become fundamental to delivering that all-important digital experience. Financial services today will require new end-to-end solutions that provide the reach, visibility, and actionable insight that they require to see and assure the delivery of digital experience across the entirety of owned and unowned environments.
Delivering a consistent digital experience for banking customers
According to research, 80 per cent of financial services industry executives view the website of the mobile app as a critical point of interaction and 91 per cent of FS institutions have board-level support to move their mainframe workloads to the public cloud.
As IT teams redesign their service delivery for a digital, hybrid landscape, FS institutions are reliant on network monitoring and assurance technology to deliver three main initiatives:
- Improve the reliability and application performance to meet customer expectations digitally and at the branch.
- Empower and enable employees to deliver the experiences customers expect from anywhere.
- Provide digital experience solutions that enable high availability of financial applications to customers and employees.
Without active monitoring across the internet and cloud, these external networks become giant blind spots that risk undermining the significant advancements of the FS industry which has and continues to pioneer a robust online presence to meet modern consumers’ expectations.
Assuring digital excellence to deliver trust, and more
For FS institutions, which depend on building and constantly reinforcing established relationships with customers built on trust, assuring digital experience performance and delivery is a key priority.
Expanding visibility and assurance across on-premises and public cloud environments, combined with Internet and SaaS insights, empowers FS institutions to unlock visibility into domains outside of IT teams’ control and optimise for uptime by achieving a more proactive approach to performance optimisation and troubleshooting.
By increasing visibility into external networks, IT teams can see disruptions that occur across the global Internet that are affecting the accessibility of their applications and online services. When an issue is detected, the team can act quickly to drill down into the affected service path, collaborate with third-party providers as necessary, and mitigate the impact of a disruption before it has the chance to cause significant damage to user experience.
Forever the champions of digital excellence, FS institutions are increasingly eyeing new AI-powered capabilities that not only detect outages across the entire global area network, but analyse billions of measurements to automatically surface disruptions that matter (and not the ones that don’t), and even forecast conditions that ultimately support intelligent policy configurations that not only mitigate an outage, but prevent it completely.
It’s an exciting future and by embracing new innovations, FS companies stand a lot to gain as they continue to push the edge of what customers both want and need from ever-increasing digital solutions.
