Choosing a data center & cloud solutions partner can be intimidating for any business, but especially for the financial industry with its strict regulations and reliance on top-tier network performance.
Here are four considerations to take into account when making such a major decision about your company’s IT strategy
- Speed
Ultra-low latency is arguably the single most important network-related consideration for financial institutions – right alongside #2 on our list.
Wall Street, and particularly high frequency trading, functions on nanoseconds – and every single one that ticks by can cost money. As this New York Times article points out, Google has invented technology to track time in 100 billionths of a second, and Nasdaq engineers are using machine learning to sync a network with that accuracy in hopes of preventing front-running and ensuring that orders are placed fairly.
That’s a rather extreme example, but network speed is important to all financial organizations, from retail and investment banks to brokerage firms and mortgage companies. Commercial banks, for example, require an incredible amount of bandwidth; together, online and mobile banking make up the primary banking management platforms for two-thirds of the U.S. population, a recent survey found.
2. Security & Compliance
With the increase in digital banking comes an even more serious look at security and compliance. A poll of more than 3,000 U.S. adults found that 60 percent of consumers pay bills online and about half of them are concerned with the security of that activity. Meanwhile, 57 percent of respondents who hadn’t used mobile banking in the past 30 days said security was the main culprit.
We’ve all heard the horror stories of data breaches affecting tens of thousands of bank customers; in April & May 2018 alone, we witnessed a potential data theft at SunTrust Banks, a major cybersecurity issue with two of Canada’s biggest banks and the loss of 20 million customers’ data by Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Sometimes, retailers are at fault for financial data breaches, but financial organizations need to do what they can on their end, as well. Partnering with data center & cloud solutions providers that specialize in this space is critical.
3. Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
That brings us to another point: data center solutions providers that don’t have market-leading disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) services for their customers simply aren’t a good fit for financial firms.
To stay compliant with regulations such as PCI DSS and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, businesses should establish and test a comprehensive, actionable DR/BC plan. This can be tricky, time-consuming and costly — a pain point for small- to medium-sized firms especially — so disaster recovery-as-a-service is a great option to simplify the process and leverage an IT partner’s expertise.
4. Hybrid Options
Last but certainly not least, another important factor for financial institutions to consider is a data center & cloud provider’s ability to offer solid hybrid IT options.
Though the financial sector has been hesitant to move to the cloud, the shift is underway. Deloitte reported that many financial services companies, such as J.P. Morgan, Capital One, regional banks and insurance firms, are moving at least a portion of their workloads to the public cloud. Some financial companies are experimenting with public cloud usage during high-processing times.
A recent Gartner survey of senior financial executives found that “36 percent of enterprises will use the cloud to support more than half of their transactional systems of record” by 2020.
Due to security and compliance issues and other concerns, many financial firms want to keep some workloads on-premises, and the right data center & cloud partner will guide them through those decisions.
As a leading provider of hybrid data center solutions with an emphasis on security and compliance and a low latency, nationwide fiber network, 365 Data Centers is a natural fit for the financial services sector.
You may know 365 as a colocation provider, but we’re much more. We have added industry-leading cloud and managed services to our portfolio, including disaster recovery-as-a-service, business continuity and backup and recovery. By building on top of our powerful infrastructure backbone, 365 has transformed into a hybrid IT services provider enabled by a secure and reliable network.
365 Data Centers supports mission-critical application infrastructure by providing industry-leading SLA protections and adhering to standards such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, VISA, SSAE 16, SOC 2 and ISAE 3402.
Call 866-365-6246, email [email protected] or fill out this form to get in touch.
