Bringing Strong IT to Finance: Hyperconvergence Enables Bankers and Financial Offices
In the financial world, data is everything. That’s why many banks and other financial institutions, as well as businesses in the financial sector, can benefit from a new IT principal called hyperconvergence.
Hyperconvergent systems move various system components together and make them direct communicators with each other. Hyperconvergence gathers storage, computing and network resources, and puts them in the same environment. This method replaces older traditional systems like a Redundant Array of Independent Disks setup tied to a data center and other individual pieces of a digital architecture.
Financial companies are using hyperconverged systems in some interesting ways to meet the demands of today’s fast-paced business world.
Building Ahead: How Hyperconvergence Serves Scalability
One of the big benefits for financial businesses using hyperconverged systems is that it’s much easier to scale up when demand grows. One of the biggest trends in hyperconvergence application is the use of hyperconvergent platforms for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) — a financial business may have 100 or more workstations running clones of an operating system, and these may be operated by permanent or short-term staffers. Simply put, a hyperconvergent model enables more streamlined setups for these many individual workstations, and frees up time and resources for management, as in this example of a bank adopting a hyperconvergent vendor product and realizing significantly easier scaling over time.
Finding Out About the Past: Organization and Discovery
Hyperconvergent setups can also be effective for financial businesses that find themselves needing to dig deep into their operational data to bring out concrete sets of information for discovery purposes.
Financial businesses have audits. They need to satisfy rules and standards like Sarbanes-Oxley, a federal law applied to the industry, and show transparent results related to what they do. So from time to time, they need to be able to get specific data back out of a system.
Hyperconvergent systems tend to support better organization. Because they’re more streamlined, the businesses may be able to achieve discovery in a more efficient way. Where an external storage component might have presented a bottleneck, a new hyperconvergent platform can make discovery and data extraction easier. This is a big plus in a legal situation, or for audit results, or in many other scenarios.
That’s not to mention the value of hyperconvergent systems for redundancy and data backup. Many business have dedicated data backup and recovery plans – they need them, in case a particular data center is compromised. Hyperconvergence also streamlines data coming into and out of these systems.
Tracking the Money: Hypercovergence for Performance
Another aspect where hyperconvergence can be useful is in performance of software and hardware systems.
Financial businesses often have to facilitate second to second transactions, thousands or even millions of tiny transactions that need to happen quickly.
Think about how much lack of access to online banking can hurt a bank or financial business. Think about how quickly financial data has to be routed to support every purchase that someone makes at a POS or cashier station. In this context, the benefit of hyperconvergence shines clear. By enhancing performance, financial businesses can make those transactions speedier and more liable, no matter who the users are.
Along with taking setups to separate sensitive financial data, and pursuing network best practices, a lot of banks and financial businesses are jumping on the hyperconvergence bandwagon. They’re realizing that having a single platform and point of access for data that’s in different pots can give the business more control and more capability, because again, most of these businesses maintain huge amounts of data as a primary responsibility. Think about how hyperconvergence principles apply to today’s financial behemoths and small businesses alike.
