The stakes are too high for financial organizations to deal with downtime. In the competitive banking and financial world, network components need to be up and running constantly. Any IT outage threatens your relationship with customers and your ability to run day-to-day operations.
For fast-paced financial organizations like stock exchanges, banks, and trading companies, downtime can put a halt to everything. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.
And there are costs.
What are the business implications of network downtime for financial organizations?
Examining the business impact of downtime reveals costs that are too high to risk. Here are four ways network downtime can potentially negatively affect business.
Downtime could cost you millions.
Outages are always lose-lose. You stand to lose profit, new business, and customers. Every minute is costly, so even short outages are painful for financial companies.
Consider, for example, how much a day-trader would stand to lose if their workstation were to go down even briefly mid-morning. When the ability to buy and sell stock depends on internet and trading platform connectivity, the technology can’t fail.
Network downtime threatens customer relationships.
In an increasingly digital world, customers expect constant access to their online banking, portfolios, and financial services. Frustration over downtime can present issues with customer retention. Poor customer experiences can be reputation-damaging, making it hard to attract new customers.
Physical devices such as ATMs and other IP-enabled devices also need to be working at all times to ensure customer satisfaction.
Downtime obstructs remote connectivity.
With many financial organizations spread out over geographic areas, network failure prevents remote employees from connecting to the network to do their jobs—whether it’s from home or a remote office location.
If an executive is in his or her home office having a late-night video conference with an overseas partner, it’s imperative that the remote network access be reliable, even after-hours.
Network downtime results in security risks.
Door alarms, cameras, badge access, door phones, and door locks all keep physical financial offices safe from intruders. If any of these things are IP-based, an outage will create security holes and put your business at risk.
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Prevent downtime with network mapping tools
One of the best ways financial organizations can support network connectivity is by having constant visibility into network performance. If IT is keeping an eye on the entire network, they will know what normal traffic levels look like and be able to detect abnormal activity that could lead to outages.
Network mapping tools give IT professionals the power to be proactive. With network mapping software they can:
- Monitor business-critical network components. Realistically, for the financial services and banking industries, this is every component—but particularly critical applications for trading, brokerage, and other key areas of your business that you can’t afford to pause.
- Ensure connectivity. From your internet to your phones, a network mapping tool will show every IP-enabled device or application and its current status so you can troubleshoot if issues threaten performance.
- Keep remote connections strong. Along with headquarters, financial organizations can map, monitor, and set up alerts for devices in remote locations as well. Whether this is branch locations across the country or the CEO’s home office, IT can keep an eye on all of it at once.
- Set customized performance alerts. In an industry that continues around the clock, even if IT goes home at five, they can receive email or text alerts if network performance has been compromised.
Don’t risk the possibility of downtime. By creating a network map with real-time data updates, you can monitor for unexpected issues and troubleshoot before users are affected.
IT pros love Intermapper as a reliable, user-friendly network monitoring and mapping software. Try a 30-day trial. We also offer a 10-device free version.
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