With branches spread nationwide or internationally, alternative financial services companies often rely on multiple telecom carriers to provide the circuits to transmit data between branches and perform business functions no matter the location. Managing the complexity of multi-site WAN connectivity and numerous carriers creates a nightmare for network administrators to maintain service quality across sites.
Alternative financial industry corporations depend on seamless network performance to serve their customers, but sub-optimal Internet circuits can lead to poor user experience for both customers and employees.
Who is to blame for poor network performance?
If a financial services company with hundreds of locations lacks a cohesive networking and communications strategy or the service level agreements to guarantee performance, their IT staff will find it impossible to hold carriers accountable. It’s only a matter of time before IT staff begin to spend more efforts troubleshooting, managing a mix of connections, and suffering from a lack of visibility into the network and applications.
Most financial services companies find themselves maintaining and replacing end-of-life DMVPN equipment at this stage. Ongoing maintenance or replacement of equipment is extremely costly. The investment can quickly put an organization at a disadvantage while competing against more progressive financial services companies adopting VMware SD-WAN™ and other digital age technologies like Cisco Meraki through a Network as a Service (NaaS) provider like OnX Canada.
Also read: What is NaaS, and what can this solution do for my enterprise?
By bridging branch connections with Cisco Meraki NaaS and VMware SD-WAN, financial services companies can:
- Boost call quality and ensure carriers meet service level agreements.
- Increase bandwidth and improve cloud access and performance.
- Gain network visibility to guide real-time decisions.
- Enhance network flexibility and agility.
- Improve reliability, security, and scalability across locations.
- Co-manage a software-defined network with 24x7x365 support access.
- Better manage costs with a fixed operational expense model.
Learn more: SD-WAN: secure branch networking solution
Financial services firms use NaaS and SD-WAN to solve call quality and app performance issues across branches
Financial services companies that partner with an experienced and certified SD-WAN provider benefit from their ability to assess the current network environment and determine the best path forward based on connectivity needs and cost.
When tasked with implementing SD-WAN across hundreds or thousands of locations at the national or multi-national level, companies rely on partner expertise for configuration and rollout without interruption to their retail operations.
By implementing a NaaS solution powered by Cisco Meraki, companies benefit from holistic network improvement without added operational costs. Cisco Meraki combines licensing, hardware, configuration, implementation, and management in a fixed monthly expense. The addition of Meraki’s single-pane-of-glass dashboard provides increased visibility into the entire network—from on-premises hardware to the Cloud and data center—enabling companies to take an active role in management. By gaining clear insight into the network, teams boost incident response effectiveness and efficiency, simplify technology deployment, and improve security.
Ultimately, the goal for any organization implementing NaaS and SD-WAN is to deliver reliable and secure connectivity throughout its network of corporate and retail locations.
By working with a certified SD-WAN managed services provider with industry experience, your company can ensure clear voice quality, increased bandwidth, and improved cloud access and performance for employees and customers. IT staff gains greater visibility across the network. And by co-managing the environment with access to 24x7x365 support, network personnel can focus on innovation for better customer service rather than addressing complaints and putting out fires.
“Choosing OnX as our partner allowed Money Mart to have the people and processes needed to make the progress we wanted. Their expertise in Cisco Meraki NaaS and VMware SD-WAN and attention to detail during the project management phase allowed us to be non-intrusive to our retail stores while transforming our network.”
– Krishna Chava, Director of Network and Telecom, Money Mart
Choosing the right solution for your financial services company will impact your long-term success. Download our guide to learn what questions to ask a potential SD-WAN provider.
With a co-managed NaaS and SD-WAN solution in place, your organization:
- Gains network visibility to guide real-time decisions.
- Improves end-user experience with increased bandwidth, better call quality, and faster cloud application performance.
- Provides IT staff with the ability to ensure carriers meet service level agreements.
- Increases network reliability, security, and scalability across locations.
- Gains access to 24x7x365 support so IT can focus on innovation.
- Benefits from a fixed and predictable operational expense model.
Read this case study for a closer look at how implementing a Cisco Meraki NaaS and VMware SD-WAN solution enhanced Money Mart’s overall network performance and end-user experience.