After years of taking a ‘wait and see’ approach, fintech applications are moving to the public cloud.
As a vendor with the privilege of talking to both application providers and financial institutions (FIs) daily, we find very few who are happy with the WAN solutions available to them as they move to the cloud.
Initially, many think of SD-WAN as an example of network innovation applied to the cloud… and they’re right. SD-WAN moved the networking market forward in valuable ways. But its target market doesn’t span the entire spectrum of cloud networking use cases.
SD-WAN is designed and priced to displace MPLS. And why shouldn’t it? MPLS is almost universally unloved. Expenses, feature constraints, and long deployment lead times are just a few of the reasons to want to replace MPLS connections with something better.
Beyond that, when connecting to the cloud, MPLS connections struggle at the most basic level of supporting the architectures of a cloud network with many virtual private clouds (VPCs) and distributed services. This provides a tipping point for many companies to reexamine their networking options as they move to the cloud.
The Limitations of SD-WAN for Cloud Networking in Fintech
SD-WAN has found a home in branch office networks by replacing MPLS completely or dramatically reducing the bandwidth allocated on those circuits.
But even the networking improvements provided by most SD-WAN solutions have many organizations wanting something better when connecting multi-tenant cloud applications and on-premise systems.
While great at connecting one data center or branch office to a similar environment, SD-WANs still struggle with networking cloud applications. When networking experts do build cloud networks with SD-WAN these connections, similar to a VPN, are typically still managed individually and erode some of the operational benefits of evolving to multi-tenant cloud applications.
High costs, complexity, and lack of global control over all networks have caused fintech providers to hope for a better way as they transition to the cloud.
The Fintech Network Challenge
Fintech providers have the unique challenge of connecting to FI data that is outside of their control.
In the never-ending desire to add more customer features, FIs are looking at the flexibility and innovations coming from cloud-delivered fintech applications. But these FIs want to keep their core banking data in their own data centers or those of the major cores. The challenge is that they often lack certified networking engineers onsite to manage the deployment of networking required for a new fintech application. This causes them to fall back to the legacy networking solutions that cause problems for the fintech providers.
In other words, the most common networking solutions aren’t working for fintech providers OR their customers.
Cloud Fintech Needs a Better Network
While some may put Trustgrid’s software-defined networking into the “SD-WAN” site-to-site networking bucket (and they would not be wrong), Trustgrid has specialized in the needs of a different use case – the cloud to data center connections.
By designing Trustgrid’s software-defined connectivity from the ground up, we have left all of the legacy problems of hardware dependency, complex NAT, BGP configuration and time-consuming security patching behind. All of the things that have kept fintech from going all-in with SD-WAN in the cloud.
Trustgrid enables fintech to connect clouds, datacenters, and other on-premise networks with a single fabric of connectivity. Could SD-WAN do this? Possibly with a web of custom-tailored configurations, 3rd party tools and team of experts. But fintech providers want something more elegant than this due to a number of challenges not experienced with other organizations:
- Security expectations are much higher than inter-organization connections
- Availability is critical and customized solutions typically lack the needed uptime SLAs
- Deployment requires coordination between their team and their customer’s (and sometimes without IT readily available at a customer’s site)
- Cost control is important. Additional network costs erode fintech margins
- All network activities should be centrally logged for compliance reporting
- Staying on top of the patching and updating is critical but difficult across hundreds of individual connections.
While SD-WAN may excel in branch-to-branch connections or routing traffic for multiple applications over multiple internet connections, Trustgrid’s focus on cloud-to-on-premise (sometimes referred to as Hybrid Cloud) connections make it ideal for cloud-delivered fintech.
Delivering Cloud Networking Solutions for Fintech Applications
As more fintech application providers transition to the cloud, there is a growing need to partner with a networking vendor who realizes the unique needs of cloud networking and focuses on delivering exactly what their application needs.
Trustgrid focuses on those cloud-to-on-premise networks where you don’t control both sides of a connection, where one side is cloud and the other side is ANY other environment, where an application’s devOps team wants to control the network as an integrated part of their application, and where application providers want to get out of building complex networks all together.
Moving to the cloud represents an evolution of the thinking, technology and processes…. the way it all connects should be part of this evolution and shouldn’t be an afterthought or compromise to legacy technology or vendors.
Cloud fintech needs a better network… and Trustgrid is helping solve that need.
Watch our On-Demand, Networking Focused Webinar: Removing the Limitations of Cloud Fintech Applications
Watch our On-Demand, Security Focused Webinar: Securing the Modern Fintech Network