Delivering Secure Financial Connectivity

In today’s market, banking and financial services are constantly pulled in two directions. On one side they’re pulled to transform and modernize the delivery of services to compete and differentiate. On the other side, they’re forced to continuously improve their cyber security posture to mitigate advanced threats targeting the industry. These challenges are amplified by the need to maintain compliance while delivering global and adaptable service connectivity.

Traditionally, banking services companies had two choices for that connectivity: static and costly private carrier circuits, or solutions that rely on the best effort delivery of the internet combined with complex link encryption such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Choosing between these options has meant a choice between the cost, rigidity, and complexity of carrier offerings or the degraded performance and security concerns of VPNs over public internet links.

Massive Networks is delivering an alternative to traditional connectivity for the banking services market. This paper will explore the technical advantages of building a local, national, or global Wide Area Network (WAN) using One Pipe Multi-Connect®. With One Pipe financial services no longer choose between agility and security.

Predictable Reliability and Performance

The foundation of digital business functions is accessibility to the service across the network. While application requirements vary, this connectivity access should deliver a consistent, performant, and reliable user and application experience for all business applications. Within the banking sector, the cost of downtime and high latency (slow links) can often be measured in productivity and revenue lost.

Key Takeaways:

• Traditionally WAN performance and reliability was delivered using shared, or leased carrier lines. These private circuits provided bandwidth, performance, and up-time guaranteed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Additionally, these private links kept sensitive traffic such as financial transactions off public networks like the internet.
• Business and user requirements have shifted to online, always available, access to services like banking. Meanwhile many workloads shifted to the cloud. This shift has increased reliance on the public internet for ubiquitous connectivity and the agility with which connections can be added, removed, or modified.
• This shift has come with trade-offs. While the internet as a global system is reliable, the network is classified as ‘best effort.’ Latency is highly variable while the reliability of individual links is handled through rapid failover versus high-reliability. This leads to application performance problems for specific traffic types when failures occur, routes reconverge, and traffic gets retransmitted.

Utilizing Massive Networks One Pipe provides the predictable reliability and performance of private circuits with comparable flexibility and agility. A high-performance solution like Premium Blended Internet over the Massive Networks One Pipe solves these performance problems by delivering multiple Tier1 carriers over the same circuit and automatically routing traffic across the best network available. Higher reliability, along with high security of private segmented data streams over a simplified One Pipe network is the answer the Banking and Financial sector has been seeking.

Secure Connectivity

For banking and financial services, security is paramount. Customers are inundated with fraud attempts, while the companies themselves are targeted by advanced, specialized, threat actors. While securing financial services requires a comprehensive multi-faceted approach, the security of the connections themselves is a universal foundational component.

Within traditional architectures comprised of private carrier circuits the attack vector of link exposure was minimal. Fully owned private links, like dark fiber, mitigated outside threats to traffic in flight. Shared and leased lines were more susceptible to potential breach, yet still offered a greatly reduced attack vector when compared to traffic traversing the internet exposed to the world.

While encryption over internet links using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or VPN provides protection for data in-flight on internet connections, it comes with two challenges. From a theoretical perspective, the eventual availability of Quantum Computing is believed to render today’s encryption useless. From a practical perspective, misconfigurations, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other issues can expose unencrypted data to threat actors. While this holds true for both private and public circuits, encrypted traffic on the internet is under threat from all threat actors to attempt an exploit.

Delivering the Future of Secure Global Connectivity

Massive Networks believes the carrier industry’s current commodity-based model is broken and no longer serves customers’ best interests. The Massive team is working to disrupt this market with reliable, secure, and simple options tailored to the needs of industries like banking and financial services. One Pipe exemplifies this endeavor, consolidating complex and costly carrier circuits into one reliable, simple, and secure global fabric supported 24x7x365 with highly trained US-based resources.