by John Atkinson, Director of Sales Engineering, UK & Ireland, at Riverbed
Financial services organisations have traditionally relied on separate tools to monitor different aspects of their IT infrastructure, making it difficult to correlate insights and pinpoint the source of user-facing issues. Larger financial firms, in particular, used to rely on legacy systems and work with third parties. This created a lot of noise across the network, leading to ‘alert fatigue’ and making it difficult to get to the crux of performance issues.
Today, the way financial firms operate has changed. There has been exponential growth in the number of users turning away from traditional banking and towards online applications and alternative challenger banks. This has arguably been triggered by the rise of hybrid work and closure of high street banks.
The legacy infrastructure that was in place to handle customers coming into physical banks in the past was too outdated to cope with the uptake in mobile or digital services. This was primarily due to legacy systems suffering from latency and bandwidth issues as users flooded the servers. As a result, more financial firms are making the transition to hybrid cloud systems. This is to ensure companies can better handle the influx of online and mobile users and employees can work more flexible hours— while still delivering an efficient and effective service to their customers. Yet, the transition from legacy to cloud systems can be complex in large part due to operation teams losing control and visibility over their IT infrastructure. This is currently making it more challenging for them to do their jobs effectively. However, this doesn’t need to be the case.
The solution is simple: financial organisations need to utilise performance management telemetry. This will be instrumental in providing IT teams with a holistic view over their entire IT ecosystem so they can identify and resolve complex issues, creating seamless digital experiences for their employees and customers.
Consolidating through the cloud
As we’ve established, it’s paramount for financial institutions to tap into the benefits of hybrid cloud and deliver a next-generation customer experience to remain competitive. Yet, without the right level of visibility as the move is made from legacy to cloud-based systems, IT teams are forced to operate blindly. This seriously impacts their ability to determine if their infrastructure is performing at its optimum, oversee end-users’ banking experiences, and rectify any issues.
For this reason, it’s imperative that operation teams use the tools needed to analyse challenges. This can be achieved through performance management telemetry which brings together a unified view of performance and insights across the network and infrastructure, including end-user experience metrics. This data is network performance data which is correlated to provide actionable insights about performance challenges, even in hybrid work and zero trust environments. Once these issues are effectively surfaced, they can be quickly resolved to improve customer experiences, monitor security, application health, quality, and performance.
Ultimately, performance management telemetry will empower financial institutions to be strategic and proactive rather than focusing on tracking down where issues lie. In turn, this helps the organisations to remain agile and develop and deploy new services to stay ahead of the competition and keep their businesses on the track to success.
Unlocking the power of performance management telemetry
Having a broad base of performance management telemetry is the foundation of unified observability. IT teams have been relying on traditional DevOps-focused observability tools to (theoretically) provide intelligence and insights into operating conditions within an organisation’s cloud-native infrastructure for years. But most of these tools have come with significant shortcomings that leave IT teams wanting more. To tackle this, unified observability solutions aim to unify data, insights, and actions across the entire IT environment. With unified observability, IT can eliminate data silos, war rooms, and alert fatigue. Riverbed has found that our customers are using unified observability to enable more effective decision-making across domains, apply expert knowledge more broadly, and continuously improve digital experience and business performance.
A unified observability solution should incorporate automation to deliver context-rich insights that empower IT staff at all levels – even junior staff – to solve problems faster. This means IT experts will spend less time troubleshooting and more time on strategic projects and can ensure strong customer services remain in place.
Additionally, unified observability incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to help determine, for example, the behavioural analytics of packets, apps and users for automatically defining baselines and outliers. It also automates workflows to gather evidence, build context, and set priorities for struggling financial firms. What’s more, it can automatically create baselines and detect and flag abnormal changes in end-user experience and network throughput. This enables organisations to address the most critical performance challenges, while eliminating operational overheads associated with unimportant or unactionable alerts and reducing security risks associated with human error or oversight. With this, financial institutions can detect and overcome any challenges, including identifying where latency is at an unsatisfactory level. Application acceleration solutions could remediate the problem.
The consolidation of tools, and the transition from legacy to cloud systems, empowers IT teams to deliver the optimum performance possible. As a result, end-users undergo minimal disruption and can have the enhanced digital experience they are demanding from financial services providers.
A cloud-centric future
With financial businesses set to continue operating remotely for the foreseeable future, it’s clear that digital banking is here to stay. Businesses must therefore address any visibility challenges they are facing and embrace new approaches to ensure strong customer services. This means investing in solutions that enable teams to collect and analyse data from numerous sources, across the whole enterprise. Businesses that do so will succeed in giving themselves much-needed visibility over their entire ecosystem. As a result, IT teams will then feel confident in identifying and resolving complex issues for seamless cloud experiences, both now and in the future.
All of this can have a direct advantage in helping to continue the growth, innovation, and success of the wider business.
