As a Financial Service organization, you know just how much you rely on technology to conduct your business. That is why it’s so important for you to invest in an IT infrastructure that is reliable and able to meet the demands of both your staff and its customers. Some Financial Service organizations have the resources and staff available to meet these demands in-house, while others outsource to a qualified Managed Service provider. This article details the specific technology needs of a Financial Institution and how a Managed IT Services Company can help meet those needs.
Understanding the Technology Needs of Financial Services
Your Financial Service organization has unique technological needs and faces specific challenges not typical of most business organizations. Therefore, partnering with an IT service company that understands these needs and has a proven track record of delivering results for banks and financial firms, is paramount in the pursuit of your financial organization’s success. The technology needs of Financial Service organizations include:
Maximum Uptime: Your customers expect zero interruptions in their banking transactions, that’s why it is so important to have a reliable IT infrastructure that is bullet-proof. In the event of an incident (natural disaster, equipment failure, or security breach), you need a partner with the monitoring, procedures, and personnel to react and respond immediately. The result is minimized downtime so you can provide uninterupted service to your customers.
Employee Productivity: Your employees rely on technology more than ever and nothing hinders productivity like a network that’s down or a computer that’s slow and unresponsive. That’s why you need a partner that takes a proactive role in maintaining your IT infrastrcture. The right partner will have a maintenance plan that will make sure your network is in peak working condition, meaning your employees can service customers without a hitch and your customers get the level of service they demand.
Financial Data Protection: Protecting you and your customers’ financial information has become more important than ever. The reality is that financial service organizations face more threats to their private data than any other time in history. You need a network that is secure and team of cyber security experts with the tools to monitor, detect, and respond to the cyber threats to your organization.
Compliant Systems: Because of the growing cyber threats to the financial sector, Financial Service organizations must comply with several government regulations set forth by organizations like FINRA and the SEC to continue to do business legally in the United States. These regulation requirements include:
- Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
- Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC)
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and Payment Card Industry (PCI)
Managed IT Services for Financial Services
With understanding the specific technological needs of your financial services organization comes the personnel equipped with the proper tools, plans, and procedures to meet those needs. Here is an overview of the Managed IT Services we provide for Financial Service organizations.
Business Continuity
Our solutions were created in response to many years of experience and observation of financial institutions that failed to prepare for an unforeseen occurrence. Through the implementation of backups, redundancies, and other continuity strategies, IronEdge Group ensures that your data will be:
- Backed up at regular intervals at a secure location and easily acceptable.
- Protected by a recovery strategy customized for your enterprise.
- Stored and maintained using industry best practices, reviewed and updated regularly for quality and reliability.
24/7 Data Backup and Recovery
The consequences of financial and trasactional data loss can be are crippling to a business, and some never recover. IronEdge Group offers scalable solutions to accommodate the needs of the network and devices you rely on. IronEdge Group understands that mishaps take place at all hours, and implements a backup solution to allow you continued productivity as your issue is resolved.
Data Center Services
Financial Service operations require access to considerable amounts of data, which in turn require a considerable amount of storage space. We offer our clients access to a data center solution, capable of accommodating the needs of any enterprise. Your data will be kept completely secure and accessible anytime from a dynamic computing infrastructure.
From the Ground Up
Our goal is to provide the best technology solution available to assist your financial service company as it grows. As your demands increase, IronEdge Group will help you ensure that your system capabilities increase as well, to avoid downtime or a lack of necessary network power hindering your ability to go about your daily duties. Building up your business will require a solution that can be expanded as necessary, something an IronEdge Group solution will allow you to do.
IT Infrastructure Design:
IT Infrastructure design plays a significant role in a financial Institution’s ability to use the types of technology needed for growth and innovation. Taking a look at current infrastructure can help to ensure that the network can meet the demands of your team, now and in the future. Consider these questions when evaluating your current infrastructure:
- Does it meet the current needs of the network and data?
- Can it be scaled to meet the future needs of the company as it grows?
- Does peak time bring the solutions to a slow crawl, losing optimal productivity and creating a tense and inefficient workplace?
- How reliable is the infrastructure as a whole?
These are concerns that face every financial service company as they proceed with their day-to-day operations. IronEdge Group can help to alleviate these issues while ensuring your network infrastructure is capable of handling ever-changing technology demands.
The Dangers of an Insufficient Infrastructure
Regardless of the specific technology demands of a financial service business, there are several aspects of an infrastructure’s design that are required in today’s digital marketplace.
Network security is a priority requirement for every company. As a result, a company’s infrastructure needs to meet rigorous security standards and best practices, as well as have the ability to scale to meet technology requirements in the future. For many organizations, technology must be compliant with industry rules and regulations, or be at risk of losing certifications and security clearances. To ensure the success of our financial institutions, IronEdge Group’s infrastructure solutions are designed with full consideration of compliances, regulations and security.
In addition to security risks, inadequate infrastructure hampers productivity for the entire organization. The reverberations of a wireless internet solution that is unable to meet the growing demands of operations for example, will spread inefficiency throughout the company. Those organizations that wish to enable employees to work remotely must have an infrastructure prepared to support external access, including safeguards needed to mitigate the risk of external threats. Ironedge Group’s consultants are ready to assist in deployment of such advanced systems.
Improve Infrastructure without Interrupting Operations
Lost time and budgetary concerns are often the reason that companies continue using outdated technology. In the long run, however, hesitation to upgrade will prove more costly. Obsolete tools will invariably lead to lost productivity, unnecessary time loss and maintenance costs. With the help of IronEdge Group, infrastructure can receive the improvements it needs to stay productive and competitive, without affecting business operations.
Without a solid infrastructure solution, the success and reliability of technology will not reach its potential. With IronEdge Group, reaching that potential in your technology is our goal, met by implementing an infrastructure solution that will meet your particular business’s needs.
Network Monitoring and Proactive Maintenance
It isn’t enough to have defensible hardware and software to create a truly reliable infrastructure. It is common knowledge that the world of IT is constantly shifting – new threats arise every day. Devices are regularly updated and made to require more and more advanced systems to operate. With all of these adjustments, your time is consumed quickly as you run through your solutions to ensure they are are properly updated and maintained.
Let IronEdge Group be a watchful eye looking out for any concerns that may spring up due to updates, end of service announcements, or other issues.
Ensure that your network runs as it should, with minimal avoidable downtime.
No network is infallible. To minimize the risk of downtime, our IT experts will monitor your network and its many components, including:
- Your essential systems and their level of function.
- The level of network traffic your system can successfully maintain.
- Your network’s user profiles, as well as their associated security permissions.
As a result, your company experiences a boost in its efficiency and reliability, allowing you to achieve more of your objectives with fewer obstacles to get in your way.
Security as a Service
As dedicated as your IT staff may be, they simply are not able to function on a 24/7/365 basis. Dividing your resources to cover all hours will do little good as well, as fewer techs will be able to accomplish less at any given time, harming their productivity. IronEdge Group offers a solution in its Advanced Threat Defense and Intrusion Detection Systems. With these systems in place, you (and your in-house IT staff) can rest easy with the knowledge that a well-equipped and experienced staff is working to detect and absolve vulnerabilities before your organization is breached.
Monitoring of Servers and Applications
A carpenter would have a hard time building without a hammer, and your organization would have a hard time operating without your servers, software, and applications. If any of these components experience downtime, you can’t properly provide your services to your customers, ultimately losing money. To prevent this, we monitor your systems to ensure that these functioning components remain free of problems, including:
- Hardware Malfunction: Keep your hardware at full functionality by monitoring for alerts, errors and upcoming issues.
- Faults: We expedite the fault mitigation process by subscribing to intensive process management.
- Server Malfunction: Just as we monitor your other pieces of hardware, IronEdge Group will monitor your server to maximize its performance and proactively predict impairments.
- Application Failure: By monitoring your applications, we ensure your solutions are optimized for ideal performance on your systems, reducing the occurrence of failure.
With IronEdge Group your issues are mitigated and resolved before they manifest into crises. Under our watchful eyes, the crucial components of your business are maintained, allowing your productivity to continue uninterrupted.
Cloud Computing
Your employees will likely use the cloud, whether you implement it or not. Protect yourself by establishing your own company-approved cloud solution.
An industry-changing tool for collaboration, the cloud allows your end users to complete a wide variety of their necessary tasks, all the while offering you the benefits of reduced overhead and storage costs. By consulting with IronEdge Group, we can assist you in designing and selecting the options to help you implement a cloud solution that best fits your business’s needs.
Hosted Email
As the communication system you likely use most often in your business operations, your solution needs to be reliable and best suited to meet the needs of your company. With a variety of solutions to select from, IronEdge Group can offer the consulting services to aid you in your decision of which service to implement. By offering a variety of cloud-based services, as well as our own, customizable solution, we can give a kick start to your collaborative productivity.
Additionally, to keep your systems secure, IronEdge Group offers comprehensive spam and antivirus defenses to prevent your valuable time from being wasted or your network from being infiltrated. If you elect to host your email solution with IronEdge Group, you may rest assured that your email is safe, secure, and easily retrievable from our top-of-the-line data centers.
Hosted Storage Solution and Infrastructure as a Service
IronEdge Group also has the ability to provide your business with a scalable storage solution to best fit your data storage needs. Able to be accessed from anywhere a user can establish an Internet connection, your collaborative abilities will increase while your maintenance costs are eliminated. If you are concerned about the security of your critical data, rest assured that all access is protected by our industry-compliant encryption.
Furthermore, you can eliminate even more of your business costs by utilizing our Infrastructure as a Service platform. Completely customizable to your needs, our IaaS solution can reduce your maintenance and utility costs while allowing users to access it remotely, increasing the flow of income your business experiences.
As an added precaution, IronEdge Group will regularly synchronize your files to your individualized backup solution, allowing for a greater sense of security through the implementation of redundancies.
Banks and Financial Institutions We’ve Helped
The Bank of San Antonio
The Bank of San Antonio opened its first location in June of 2007 with plans to open two to three additional branches within eighteen months. Starting from the ground up, the Bank of San Antonio needed an IT infrastructure that could interface with their core systems and support the expanding branches. Learn how IronEdge Group met these needs in this case study.
South Texas Money Management
For nearly two decades, South Texas Money Management has been managing the assets of individuals, trusts, estates, employee benefits plans, and endowments. In 2014, the company relocated their corporate office and needed help planning and executing a scalable IT network infrastructure while negligible interruptions to their daily operations. Learn how IronEdge Group met these needs in this case study.