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IT under pressure: How service firms are solving network challenges

By Frontier Business Published Jul 22, 2020
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Customer loyalty is paramount to any business' success. Building that connection takes unwavering focus on consistent, positive experiences. And as our current environment forces the urgent drive to enhance digital experiences, legacy infrastructures are overwhelmed.

While personalized services, new channels and online capabilities are changing the way we grow customer relationships, they also are threatening network resilience, security and performance. Combined with increased regulatory demands and shrinking budgets, it's a perfect storm of pressure on service firms' networks and IT departments.

If you're feeling the strain, we recommend a software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) solution to solve today's challenges and position you to come out stronger going forward. With its centralized management and built-in redundancies, SD-WAN can help you meet your growing network demands—and relieve the pressure on your team.

Demand: Stay operational at all times
SD-WAN solution:
Every time you add a new application or engagement channel, you create another customer expectation. Users want access to your services anytime, from anywhere. And regulators expect your network to stay operational, no matter what. Here's how SD-WAN solves for these demands:

  • Centralized network management with single-policy deployment makes it quick and easy to apply updates and troubleshoot potential issues. For example, you can fix a bug or reroute a bottleneck with one command.
  • The SD-WAN orchestrator gives you full visibility into current network activity by application. From one portal, you can drill down to the site and user level to monitor traffic and analytics to stay ahead of compromises. You can even dig in to write and implement rules to solve problems, fast.
  • Dual active WAN links automatically fail over if one of your links goes down, ensuring always-on access and business continuity.
  • Application-aware routing prioritizes critical traffic like emergency loan applications, insurance claims and videoconferences to ensure the best connections. Dynamic, multipath optimization load balances and corrects jitter and latency for stable real-time data, voice and video communications.
While most providers overlay their SD-WAN onto a third-party underlay, Frontier builds your SD-WAN solution on its own MEF 2.0 carrier-grade Ethernet footprint. It's backed by SLAs for resilience to guarantee high availability and performance—and uninterrupted user experiences.

Demand: Meet stringent data privacy and security standards
SD-WAN solution:
Widely publicized breaches and unethical data sharing have increased the compliance pressure on financial and professional services firms. With the following layered protections, SD-WAN can help you meet the requirements:

  • Multi-tenant functionality separates simultaneously running traffic sets to ensure specific groups only have access to specific applications and data. For example, you can isolate your protected information and segment guest traffic so it doesn't impact security or performance.
  • Built-in end-to-end encryption, customizable layer-4 stateful firewall and secure VPN connectivity defend traffic to and from all devices and locations, including mobile, branches and datacenters. Your remote workforce can access applications on the cloud securely, but they can't store or share sensitive data on unsecure devices.
  • Total network control and visibility from a central location helps you detect and prevent threats and enforce WAN-wide security policies and updates remotely.
  • Many Managed SD-WAN providers are FIPS-certified to secure credit card transactions and wire transfers, ensuring compliance with PCI Data Security Standards.
Demand: Strengthen customer experience and loyalty
SD-WAN solution:
In financial and professional services, customer loyalty hinges on both data protection and personal experience. Here's a story about how SD-WAN solves for both.

A mortgage bank wanted to disrupt the industry and gain market share by providing first-visit loan approvals. It started by migrating its credit information and financial systems to the cloud, arming staff at 20 branches with tablets and working with a managed services provider to design an SD-WAN solution that:

  • Segments network traffic to secure and prioritize bandwidth for loan approval applications.
  • Configures the firewall to meet compliance standards for data privacy.
  • Ensures continuous, fast connectivity with application-aware routing and dynamic multipath optimization.
  • Provides automatic, instantaneous failover with dual active links.
With all these SD-WAN-powered capabilities, the bank now delivers on its promise of first-visit mortgage approvals. It's building customer loyalty with a significant benefit—and industry-leading competitive advantage.

Demand: Maximize your resources
SD-WAN solution:
Managed IT services include 24/7/365 performance, security monitoring and expert guidance for your digital transformation. If your provider has deep financial and professional services IT experience like Frontier Business, even better.

Your Managed SD-WAN solution will be engineered to meet your connectivity, budget and security requirements. It will integrate seamlessly with your current technologies. And you will be able to migrate at your own pace, maximizing your existing investments while phasing out expensive MPLS links.

Before implementation, your Frontier team will test and prove full integration and performance. You will stay up and running throughout your Managed SD-WAN deployment. And because it's a turnkey, white-glove service, you will experience value from day one.

Simplify the way you network with Managed SD-WAN
Call 844.206.6627 to learn more about Frontier’s IT solutions for service firms or request a live demo of Frontier Managed SD-WAN.