Network reliability is the lifeblood to every financial institution. Whatever financial businesses - banking, brokerage, or insurance - you are in, as a player in this highly competitive field, you cannot afford to have downtime that impacts your operation and your services to customers. Security is of equal importance. You will never want to wreak customer confidence by not giving top protection to your network. As your business grow and need more equipment and applications on the network, you would also want to make sure your network remains easy-to-manage and interoperable with all these additions.

What is the typical financial network like?
But the typical network scenario among many of the financial institutions today is the co-existence of both legacy boxes and new products, making integration a tall order. This also results in costly, complicated network management, as well as performance, security, and support issues.

For instance, you might want to deploy VoIP for improved productivity, communications cost reduction, enhanced customer services, but your existing legacy network simply cannot accommodate such a critical application. You might also want to add new services online, but your current network cannot support such an initiative.

In view of all these, financial institutions are starting to revamp their networks to sustain and support their business initiatives to expand.

Why do financial institutions need adaptive network?
Having reliability, security, and availability in mind, these organizations understand that point solutions are not what they need. But what solutions available in the market could meet their needs? What are the principles that they must embrace when renovating their networks?

As finance is a fast changing and heavily regulated industries, the players on one hand must keep themselves abreast with customer requirements and on the other compliance requirements. An adaptive network embedded with intelligence, therefore is a must-have for the financial institutions.

Network intelligence at the core will assure financial institutions of numerous benefits. For instance, QoS, IP/MPLS forwarding, distributed forwarding architecture, and security features enabled by network intelligence are translated into high performance and high quality services. An intelligent network also formulates strategic routing decisions based on the service resource requirement, creating a truly service-oriented, high quality network platform. At the access layer, embedded intelligence raises service awareness, thus enabling the network to differentiate between service types and accordingly making appropriate resources available. This is vital to real-time services such as voice over IP, which cannot tolerate any delay and latency. In addition, intelligence at the access layer also automates authentication and terminal security status check, which allows access only for legal and secure users and terminals.

According to Huawei-3Com, intelligence has become the paradigm in the networking space and has a key role to play in networks owned by financial institutions. To catch up with such network trends and meet the latest requirements of the finance sector, Huawei-3Com has injected much resource on R&D, for instance, 10% of revenue into developing new solutions.

What are the leading technologies for financial institutions?
Huawei-3Com's Quidway® family of solutions, built on industry standards and interoperable with systems from other suppliers, features intelligence at different layers. The company also offers financial institutions of different sizes a wide range of modular solutions.

Whether it is VoIP, the various types of VPN, IP multicast protocol, or QoS features you would like to support, you would be able to find the right and cost-effective solutions from the Huawei-3Com offerings.

Cost-effectiveness, however, does not come from low price. Financial institutions cannot afford to deploy low-cost solutions that do not take integration into account. Cost-effectiveness come from a highly integrated network that allows an organization to add new applications and services whenever necessary.

Resilient expansion is also key to the building of an easy-to-upgrade financial network. Huawei-3Com adopts an innovative Intelligent Resilient Framework(IRF) in several switch solutions, aiming to help customers expand the bandwidth and upgrade at various layer, in a simple manner.

How should financial players choose a solution vendor?
Domain knowledge becomes critically important when choosing a vendor and its solution. Financial institutions are particularly in need of proven, industry-specific solutions because of the challenges facing them.

Huawei-3Com has long been working with various types of financial institutions. As a result, it has gained unparalleled knowledge and valuable insights into the industry requirements and operations of these organizations.

On the long list of Huawei-3Com's financial customers, you will find renowned organizations including Bank of China, People's Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Construction Bank of China, and Industry and Commerce Bank of China .

You could only boost your customers' confidence in you and your service when choosing a solution from a vendor who has such experience with the finance industry. Solutions deployment must go with support. Huawei-3Com has local service centers in many of the Asia Pacific countries, providing 24x7 support to customers and ensuring their networks are always up and running. Where there is no local service center, you will find help from partners of Huawei-3Com.