The FinTech space is transforming. This transformation has been simmering for years and is just beginning to catch fire. FinTech applications, historically deployed on-premise or in private cloud environments, are moving to the public cloud.
From our unique vantage point of talking to application providers and Financial Institutions (FIs) daily, we find very few (to say it kindly) who are happy with WAN innovations available to them as they move to the cloud.
Many initially 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 it’s 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 these days. Expenses, performance, and long lead times are just a few of the reasons to want to replace MPLS connections.
Beyond that, when connecting to the cloud, MPLS connections simply struggle to accomplish the deployment, automation and support needs of a cloud network. This provides a tipping point for many companies to reexamine their networking options as they move to the cloud.
SD-WAN has found a home in branch office networks. Unhooking MPLS completely or dramatically reducing the bandwidth allocated on those circuits.
But even the networking improvements provided by SD-WAN have required many organizations to look for something better when building connections between their cloud applications and on-premise systems.
High costs and complexity have caused FinTech providers in particular to look for a better way.
The Specific Needs of FinTech Applications
FinTech providers are in the unique situation of having to connect to Financial Institution data that is outside of their control. These FIs keep their core banking data in their own data centers or those of the major cores, but often lack network-savvy staff onsite to manage the deployment of the WAN technology required for new FinTech applications.
This means slower deployments, reduction of support capabilities and an overall erosion of the customer experience.
Trustgrid Is Built for FinTech
While some may put Trustgrid’s software-defined networking into the “SD-WAN” bucket. Trustgrid is focused on the needs of a different market – the point-to-point connections between two different organizations.
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 between clouds, data centers, and other on-premise networks. Could SD-WAN do this? Sometimes and for some organizations. But FinTech encounters many unique challenges not experienced by other organizations:
- Security expectations are much higher than inter-organization connections
- Change management takes on entirely new dimensions when connecting two separate organizations
- Deployment requires coordination between the IT teams of different companies
- Cost becomes more important as any additional network costs erode FinTech applications margins
- Compliance is everyone’s responsibility and all network activities must be logged
- Patching and updating of individual connections becomes a burden as the number of cloud-to-on-premise connections increases
SD-WAN is an innovative technology that is adjacent to the space that Trustgrid occupies. SD-WAN is a sub-set of the wider Software-Defined Networking category of connectivity.
While SD-WAN may be better in branch-to-branch connections or routing traffic for multiple applications over multiple internet connections, Trustgrid is focused on a more neglected part of the cloud networking market….Cloud to on-premise connections.
As more FinTech application providers transition to the cloud, there is a growing need to partner with a networking vendor that realizes the unique needs of this space.
Trustgrid is focused on those cloud-to-on-premise networks where you don’t control both sides of a connection, where one side is public or private cloud and the other side is ANY other environment, where an application’s DevOps team wants to control the network as another managed service and where application providers want to get out of the CapEx hardware game.
Moving to the public 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.