NetBrain Financial Services eBook
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business Overcome the skills gap, maintain compliance, and gain operational efficiency to ensure you’re ready for what’s next
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Preventing service outages and degradations lowers your operational costs and reduces risk. Reacting to problems takes dramatically more time, resources, and expense than preventing those problems from occurring in the first place. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 1
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Gain Network Agility at Scale Computer networks are the central nervous system that allows financial and banking institutions to optimize service delivery in the highly-competitive financial services market. So much trust is placed on the network and keeping it up and running is vital to maintaining a competitive edge. Over the past decades, most institutions developed time- and labor-intensive operational policies and procedures to preempt network disruptions but ended up being error-prone and highly inefficient. As these organizations scale their growing networks, it spurs even more ineffective operations. Mitigating risk and maximizing efficiency is paramount, but many established organizations have yet to adopt automation for their legacy networks. In fact, the next big opportunity for automation lies in Day-2 network operations. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 2
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Current State and Market With change and volatility being the norm, financial firms must build for resiliency to weather the uncertainty ahead. Digital revolutions have brought innovation. The way people bank has evolved from in-person to online. Future-ready operations means embracing digital platforms to deliver new exceptional services. IT groups in large firms support banking services with greater reliability and flexibility than ever before. Digital transformation alone doesn’t lead to success. The rapid adoption of technologies, such as cloud, SD-WAN, SDN, and virtualization alongside traditional architecture, has fragmented data and visibility. The sheer number of tools needed to manage these fractured IT systems has exploded alongside an ever-increasing sea of regulations. The typical financial organization According to a study done by Wolters Kluwer must, on average, deal with % of U.S. 223 54 banks regulatory developments every day, according to Thomson are concerned with their institution’s ability 1 Reuters. to keep track of changing regulations. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 3
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation A commitment to modernization of all facets of IT operations is mandatory. Efficient, risk-averse, and agile Day-2 network operations are critical on the path to not only survive but thrive in this resource-constrained era. Overcome the IT Skills Deficit What’s more, retaining skilled employees and increasing the talent pool has become more difficult after the pandemic and The Great Resignation. The labor participation rate currently remains percentage 1.1 points below pre-pandemic levels, with limited signs of a rebound in the near term according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.2 A looming recession in 2023 will most likely validate this. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 4
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation A New Automation Frontier The age of automation is already upon us. It’s transforming us in ways we never imagined were possible.3 The Investment Push Continues of banks Banking LOB budget increases Banking are increasing for operations automation in the operations % 4 83 operations next 12-24 months automation automation budget next budget in next 12-24 months 12-24 months Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 5
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation The key to navigating the demands on network infrastructure is a no-code Day-2 automation platform with multi-vendor, multi-technology support. Financial IT organizations must adopt newer, more advanced automation capabilities that replace manual and repetitive processes with proactive prevention and visibility across cloud, virtual, software- defined, & traditional networks. This next generation of network automation in adoption today will update processes to stay nimble, maintain compliance and improve service delivery while leveraging human intelligence to scale faster. It supports more digital and cloud platforms for highly performant and highly available online, enterprise, and investment banking. According to respondents to IDC’s WW Yet fewer than Industry CloudPath survey (May 2020), of the responding of banks % institutions % currently run hybrid 25 have implemented tools 57 environments consisting of to track and resolve public and private cloud disruptions to this critical as well as traditional on- 5 premises deployments. infrastructure. But, with so many tools to solve these problems, it can be overwhelming. The choices in the market are vast - ranging from your network hardware vendor to open source to a plethora of low-code startups. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 6
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Despite the proliferation of tools, most In addition to the need to gather large amounts of critical data to feed enterprises would agree that they already autonomous systems, the two biggest challenges to implementing an possess subject matter experts with the automation-centric approach to scalable network operations have been, knowledge and experience needed to solve 1) the limited visibility of the entire network, with all the performance and any network problem or operational issue. The configuration detail needed for every network component and their challenge is they cannot easily digitize and context, and automate that knowledge at scale. They must find a means to capture that existing 2) the lack of a means to capture problem solving expertise and expert knowledge instead of solutions that attempt to knowledge with a proven no-code automation platform. generate problem-solving knowledge from scratch, taking years which is the impediment One that can address any operational issue, from the simplest to the most in the adoption of AIOps. complex, without the need for rigid development projects or programmers and the associated costs of software engineering. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 7
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Network automation delivers a fundamentally Around the World, different approach to IT services at financial Financial Entities Regularly organizations by: Suffer Digital Outages... 1. Transforming legacy environments Significant/severe outages are that have stifled innovation for too not uncommon in finance long 2. Scaling faster without adding skilled personnel to develop and manage heavy-code technologies such as 32% Ansible which can script changes but won’t assist with problem diagnosis, Notable, serious mitigation, or prevention or severe 3. Reducing the risk of security breaches impact and maintaining configuration design compliance How would you classify the 4. Preventing serious outages and their most significant outage that business impacts thereby avoiding your organization has had in being front page news for preventing the past 3 years, either in your access to people’s money own site or a third-party provider site?6 Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 8
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation 5. Providing visibility with the ability to Most significant publicly reported automatically map and document the outages by sector, 2019-2021 entire network 6. Eliminating configuration drift and the fear of making erroneous changes to the network that could have disastrous consequences a) For example, fear of touching legacy firewall rules even though outdated security policies cause vulnerabilities 5. Leveraging a single source of truth with full understanding of a hybrid- cloud environment to empower collaboration and eliminate siloed operations teams, like networking and Publicly reported outages by security, that have interdependencies sector 6. Understanding the requirements (significant/serious/severe) 2019- 7 needed through a trusted technology 2021; partner without disrupting the business during implementation Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 9
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation The key to making a strategic operations transformation successful is to intelligently automate network problem diagnosis and outage prevention at scale. This means going beyond automation of initial deployments and configuration to automation of Day-2 operations. Overall, what do you consider to be the most important benefits of fintech for your organization? Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 10
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Financial services IT organizations need a smarter tool, a platform that can transcend the boundaries of siloed operations teams. It also requires a platform that doesn’t rely on coding which limits usability to a small number of experts. One that is multi-vendor and enables agile operations to help the business withstand the pressures from external forces of uncertainty and orchestrate complex infrastructure with efficiency. Navigate regulatory requirements like an expert By Imagine not having to worry about new regulations or whether you’ll be prepared for your next audit. 2024 Keeping up with compliance mandates, steep annual investment on regulatory compliance reporting will be regulatory penalties, cybersecurity threats, and maintaining uptime for ‘real time’ platforms (like 8 trading) using old technology is near impossible. $2.7 billion Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 11
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Be protected from the unintended consequences of change management In the finance world, change equals risk. How does adding a new device affect your network? How can you ensure its configuration follows company standards? How often should you verify its compliance after installation? Networks influence every facet of operations, and any change can disrupt business. Every device must be certified to perform properly, but the amount of work per device is insurmountable. According to Uptime Institute, more than of all data center outages 70% are caused by human error either incorrectly applied changes, or changes that were applied correctly but for some reason not what was intended. This contrasts with what most people assume is the main cause of outages - hardware or software failures. Even successful device-level changes using traditional approaches can result in unintended consequences. It’s essential to safeguard your network design and configurations from human and design errors to help you maintain people’s access to their money. Therefore, a change management process must be able to protect application delivery by preventing costly outages from impacting your organization, ensuring maximum uptime, and improving operational efficiency and productivity. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 12
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Mitigate service outages and performance degradations Gain visibility across networks and clouds Modern outages are described more often today as service degradations, where business services continue to be available, but at a reduced level. It’s critical to deliver reliable financial services for customers, including transactions, to avoid poor service and negative impact to customers’ businesses. Even in resilient and secured There is a gap in visibility between your digital experience hybrid infrastructures, the reality is that services outages monitoring tool and your observability tool. It’s critical to are increasing in frequency and severity. This has an maintain complete visibility to the internal network. impact on both direct and indirect costs. Every moment Without edge-to-cloud visibility, you don’t know if an issue infrastructures are degraded contribute to both hard and occurred or where it occurred meaning it takes longer to soft costs, reputation, customer satisfaction, and in the find and fix problems. worst-case scenarios, valuations. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 13
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Application performance visibility to new self-service apps and traditional application paths is essential especially when traversing hybrid-cloud networks. Since applications can be affected by network conditions including latency, jitter, and packet loss, it’s important to monitor proper configuration and proactively check it according to baseline configurations. By visualizing application paths against golden paths, it becomes easy to isolate problems. With financial services workloads in a distributed environment, a single source of truth across teams can accelerate network tasks and foster collaboration. Digital Infrastructure Is Hybrid: Complex, Distributed, and Multi-party Financial Services workloads run in multiple locations Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 14
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Without accurate data, operations teams won't be able to trust the data and the changes they make to the network. EMA reports that nearly An NSoTbased on partially accurate components will limit the of organizations ability to scale network automation initiatives beyond % are still relying at least of activities.10 48 partially on manual % Most enterprises don’t have an accurate, robust data gathering for their 50 “enterprise class” NSoT(we estimate it is lower data center network 9 than 25%). We recommend investing in a modern automation tools. 11 NSoTto scale network automation efforts. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 15
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation More financial IT organizations choose NetBrain because it helps them be enablers of their businesses. It reduces their risk posture and gives them the confidence to make accurate changes to the network. That’s because NetBrain is foundationally different than any other automation approach in use today in enterprise networks. It delivers on the promise of Intent-Based Networking (IBN) across any hybrid, multi-vendor network using automation to preserve the desired behaviors (intents) needed for every application to perform consistently. NetBrain Problem Diagnosis Automation System (PDAS) is a platform Network Intents built on a set of patented core technologies that change the entire describe all the paradigm for managing hybrid networks by using Network Intents. Network Intents describe all the required behaviors of the network in required behaviors the context of each application and IT service it supports. Network of the network in Intents quantify the connectivity, performance and security controls the context of each that must exist for each service to be successful. NetBrain uses them to application and IT address abnormal behaviors, to proactively respond to external events, and to continuously verify the entire network is operating correctly. service it supports Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 16
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation The system captures the entire design of the hybrid NetBrain Prevents More Types of NetOps Problems for network as thousands of intents that describe the Financial Services connectivity, performance characteristics, and security NetBrain PDAS helps financial services organizations get profiles needed by each service. NetBrain then uses this control of network operations – today - to help them give their intent-based model of the network to verify the network’s businesses an edge. ability to deliver applications reliably, to prevent network outages, to allow you to make changes to the network 1. Preventing Outages and Disruption – it’s all about safely and to reduce remediation times when unforeseen application performance network issues do occur. An advanced no-code engine allows subject matter • When moving applications from test to production, experts to capture their expertise so it can be shared and NetBrain can help resolve any network issue. re-used by others across the organization. This reduces • Schedule network intent health checks to manage escalations and the delays associated with device performance, detect path changes troubleshooting. (latency/errors), and identify and detect port flapping A real-time digital twin connects to a no-code and packet loss between destinations. automation platform to capture the intent of the business • Get alerted when and how you want to prevent issues applications and translate that to all the network from impacting the business. components in the network. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 17
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation 2. Protect Change Management from Configuration Drift and Human Error • Confidently make configuration changes at scale and let NetBrain maintain network fidelity by checking the change itself and the impact on the rest of the network (e.g., Intents enforce the firewall rules, their dependencies and pathing between environments). • See end-to-end paths and set Intents to see where rules might be causing issues with applications (i.e., firewall rules). • Accelerate patching tasks and reduce the risk of human error and unforeseen impacts to services delivered by the network. 3. Gain Confidence with Security and Compliance Enforcement • Maintain continuous security policy and zone enforcement by validating network intents against baseline security policies automatically. • Locate network devices quickly in case of alert from a SIEM tool about a potential breach so you can harden the network and prevent further infiltration. 4. Contextualize Application Path Performance • Bring back control to the networking team with the added layer of contextual performance information right on any live network map. • Quickly determine if the network is the cause of application performance problems. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 18
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation 5. Make Your Network a Single Source of Truth with Edge-to-Cloud Visibility • The Digital Twin maintains real-time understanding of the network and the traffic that flows on it. Digital twins are important for process modeling, business continuity, and to maintain up-to-date documentation for increasingly complex technology infrastructures. • Intents are integrated and overlayed on maps as diagnostics along with 3rd- party ITSM, observability and performance monitoring tool data to give you a single pane of glass for all applications and their connectivity. Even get real-time diagnostic data for low-tolerance trading platforms. • Bring up precise network documentation and export it as dynamic maps anytime you need it, so you always know what’s in your network and are prepared for unexpected audits. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 19
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation 6. Proactively Troubleshoot Network Problems • Automated Intent validation makes it easier to remediate issues faster, enforce security and maintain compliance. • Respond faster to problems and collaborate across operations teams, self-service. • NetBrain leverages the intelligence of your experts to build automation without coding. • NetBrain comes with an Intent Library with more than 60 pre-built network automation that solve most network problems seen throughout enterprises and MSPs and is ready to use right out of the box. • Integrated with the library are Network Intent Templates (NIT) that replicate network intents across the entire network to scale troubleshooting in just a few clicks. • An Intent Timer helps keep up with updates to baseline and changes to devices. 7. Insource Intent-Based Network Assessments • Meet compliance mandates with a deep understanding and continuous verification of hybrid networks for accuracy. • Get accurate data anytime with a comprehensive view of information flows throughout your hybrid network. • Confidently prepare for audits. • Optimize your network and remove bottlenecks. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 20
Gain Network Agility at Scale | Current State and Market | A New Automation Frontier | Imperatives for Operational Network Transformation | Why More Financial Services Organizations Choose NetBrain for Network Automation | Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation Experience What’s Possible with Intent-Based Network Automation To adequately meet the requirements of the business, NetOps needs full control over their environment. An automation platform built for Day-2 operations and beyond can help accomplish this with the ability to translate your experts’ knowledge as shareable no-code automation. The benefits include the ability to scale faster with the business, reduce unnecessary overhead, and lower risk. Reducing costs and number of tools and footprint and bring orchestration and assessments back in-house under your control. NetBrain is the only Day-2 network automation and visibility platform that can help you maneuver the network through future business uncertainty with confidence. Innovate faster and spend more time on important tasks allowing you to be more agile in the competitive financial services market. 1 https://blogs.idc.com/2021/03/22/establishing-resiliency-through-a-modern-regulatory-change-management-strategy/ 2 The employment situation. Sep. 2022 3 Center for Financial Professionals (CeFPro®), 2022 - https://d17802kg5dey7s.cloudfront.net/webapps/mapcrm/eventspeakers/3l3o81o2q9kn4qmnhsq63sm3qt/FINTECH-LEADERS-2022-FINAL.pdf 4 Source: Industry Al Path-2021, JDC May 2021 5 IDC eBook Creating the Future Infrastructure for the Banking Industry 6 Source: Uptime Institute Global Survey of IT and Data Center Managers 2020 Financial Services Sector only (n=66) 7 Source: Uptime Institute publicly reported outages database (n=74) 8 IDC Modernizing Regulatory Change Management in Banking and Financial Services 9 Enterprise Management Associates® EMA Research Report | The Future of Data Center Network Automation 10 Graphics created by Netbrain based on Gartner research. Source: Gartner, Inc., Market Guide for Network Automation Tools, February 22, 2022. 11 Gartner® Gartner, “Market Guide for Network Automation Tools”, Andrew Lerner, Ted Corbett, 22 Feb 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Aligning Your Network Operations Plans with your Financial Services Business | 21
About NetBrain Technologies Founded in 2004, NetBrain is the market leader for NetOps automation, providing network operators and engineers with dynamic visibility across their hybrid networks and low-code/ no-code automation for key tasks across IT workflows. Today, more than 2,500 of the world’s largest enterprises and managed service providers use NetBrain to automate network problem diagnosis, generate real-time documentation, accelerate troubleshooting, and enforce enterprise architectural rules. +1 (800) 605-7964 | [email protected] | www.netbraintech.com Copyright © 2023 NetBrain Technologies, Inc. All trademarks referenced herein belong to NetBrain Technologies, Inc NB-EB-FB-010623