Go Beyond Audit: Network Monitoring for BFSI Companies

With pandemic’s sudden hitting, most offices and companies had to quickly move their operations and have an apt Work-from-Home policy defined, the technology gap in both the front end and the companies’ back-end operations came in scathing review , While BFSI institutions also had a WFH policy, there services were deemed to be necessary. Since people couldn’t line up outside banks, the banks had to keep their technology fine-tuned to assist their customers in these testing times.

From here, technology is going to be critical for all BFSI companies. With a majority of employees working from home and the customers being apprehensive about visiting the offices physically to see a Financial Advisor or Relationship Manager, technology serve as a connection point for information and activity

As per a recent survey conducted by Gartner, 23 Bank & Financial Services heads said that technology investments have become a priority specifically looking for automation that reduced the need for high-touch processes, optimized the costs, and improved remote working functionalities. Such infrastructure investments can help IT become more resilient while still remaining adaptive to respond to the fast changes at the workplace.

The IT infrastructure should also meet the internal and external service level requirements for performance, and be available to deliver critical services at the behest of next-generation monitoring with analytics at the centre of its platform.

The Challenges

Most firms in the financial services space, even the ones who don’t have a retail banking presence, tend to have operations that are scattered across the country and even the globe. A large degree of services is delivered via dedicated global service centers which are centered in one city, while the front-office functions might be delivered in other cities. This helps the firms attain economies of scale. However, it also poses a high degree of challenges to enterprise technology. The firm’s IT team has to deal with legacy-mainframe architecture, while still working on hybrid cloud computing deployments.

The retail consumer’s expectations from online services are ever-growing. Banks have to ensure their platform is always in the high availability mode for online customers. All these challenges, when accumulated, make IT Infrastructure  very complex for the IT team.

Even a minute mishap in the system can lead to millions of material losses accrued within minutes of negligence. In order to maintain service delivery while still ensuring comprehensive system security, IT teams at banks and financial institutions need a real-time monitoring system.

How Can Network Monitoring Help?

In the present time, enterprises are looking for innovative ways to digitally transform their businesses. They thus have to take a crucial step forward to remain competitive and enhance profitability.

Network monitoring helps  make more informed decisions in complex scenarios, carry out efficient monitoring and analysis; detect the smallest of change and trigger immediate action. It also helps in extending the solutions to analyze the historical trend and help with predictability.

1. Monitor Almost Anything

The ideal Network Monitoring system will cover your entire IT infrastructure. By taking note of every single IT touchpoint, it ensures every anomaly is flagged and visible to your IT team. This way, you can easily monitor your entire IT network, and easily get a check on its health by using KPIs and metrics relevant to you. You can include the software, database, operating systems, and even hardware performance in this comprehensive but accessible analysis.

2. Single Pane of Glass for Better Visibility Into Network Performance

With an Unified Monitoring – an integrated platform that monitors the entire IT infrastructure, including physical, virtual, and cloud. into a centralized  IT infrastructure  gathering network data from multiple locations and feed them back to a centralized system which is then displayed over the unified dashboard.

This helps to monitor the uptime and performance of the websites, servers, applications, web transactions, network devices, real users, and cloud services (both public and private), all from one console and one dashboard.

3. Reduce Downtime

BFSI as a sector has one unique requirement than any other industry, these organization needs their customer to have a reliable, consistent services to gain trust. Downtime even for few minutes can result in revenue loss for such organizations and on other hand result in panic among the customer if they feel insecure as their savings are at stake. Monitoring software ensures all the systems are monitored 24*7*365 days from any location.

4. Proactive Planning & Awareness

Planning helps to curb the myopic view, with automation, integrating trends and capacity planning organizations can plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems catch them by surprise. If an issue occurs, timely alerts are sent to IT staff, business stakeholders, and end-users via email or mobile text messages, with proper details so they can start working on the issues immediately.

5. Enhance Customer Experience

To make sure that a customer is happy and satisfied, the experience has to be enhanced. So, understanding how the customers are using features and services and if they’re using the services on mobile, online or inside the branch becomes very important. It is the need of the hour to proactively discover and resolve the customer issue. To fix the issues fast getting proper visibility from the data generated is required, this helps to find, troubleshoot and solve the issues with proper execution.

6. Automate – Alarm to ticket with Pre-integrated Service Desk – Integration of the Monitoring tool with service desk help automate the alarm or alert to ticket being allocated to an IT technician ensuring immediate action is being taken on the fault or error.

Key Use-Cases

The optimal way to gauge the value-generation opportunities with an effective  Network Monitoring System becomes apparent by seeing the system in action. Here are some use-cases that have helped firms in the industry optimize their operations, scale their profitability, and mitigate system security risks.

1. Remotely Monitor Bank Branches & ATMs

Retail Branches and ATMs are critical for the bank’s operational performance. They are the consumer-facing nodes of a much larger system that operates within the bank. Hence, if there is an issue on this front, systematic resolution inside the bank will not help.

With the right Network Monitoring Platform, banks can maintain a granular perspective on all the technology interactions at the retail branches as well as the ATMs from one location.

2. Application Monitoring System

Getting end-to-end transactional visibility helps in analyzing data from every application and system and helps in identifying transaction bottlenecks or errors that have occurred. This helps in addressing the issue rapidly, solve network or system issue that prevents a transaction from completing.

3. Data Centre Monitoring

It helps monitor and resolve inter and intra traffic and network performance issues of  Banks and financial institutions data interaction in day to day life by isolation and troubleshooting the root causes. IT Team can quickly establish benchmarks and baseline performance to monitor even the minutest deviation and resolve it quickly

4. Branch Office Link Monitoring

Branch Office Links help the team sitting at the zonal or central office keep a tap on the network performance parameters at the branch. Most banks and financial institutions have a centralized repository of IT systems & resources. Hence, it might become very time consuming for the branch to take care of the systemic issues in its network. The team that can monitor all the performance in real-time will be able to resolve issues quickly, without having the branch lose even a day’s worth of business.

5. Log analysis

Log Data is critical from both a security and operations management perspective. All the data has to be accessed and available in the manner as mandated by the law and available only to the authorized personnel. The data that can encompass information like date, timestamp, source addresses, and destination address will help the bank manage its internal security systems. At the same time, it can also help the bank have a proxy of the typical process flow within the firm with data on audit trails by each device, system software, and application.

6. firewall traffic monitoring

Firewall traffic monitoring helps analyze Network traffic flow, which applications are using maximum bandwidth and where is the traffic originating , IP address and more, it helps in early detection of potential threats and update firewall policies

7. Compliance

Since banks and financial institutions form a critical part of the everyday economy, they are also prone to tighter compliance schedules. The right Network Monitoring System will help the firm monitor data that complies with the local, state, and central government regulations such as PCI/DSS and ISO 27001 information security standards Keeping the log data intact also makes it easier for the auditors to perform their analysis without any hiccups.