In an environment of increasing security risks, compliance demands and intense competition, private networks offer increased business agility, cost consolidation, and control. They also better prepare financial services' IT organizations to support key challenges such as the deployment of new critical applications, merger/acquisition activity, and the resulting increases in Wide Area Network (WAN) traffic.

Challenges

Private networks require the flexibility to support diverse network traffic and the capacity to deliver high-performance throughput, as well as the ability to provide maximum availability with minimal management. So financial services organizations are increasingly faced with evaluating the tradeoff between managed services and creating their own Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks. They are increasingly finding that optical fiber is more economical and available, the price/performance ratio of network equipment has greatly improved and standards are more prevalent and mature.

Solution

By building a private WDM network, a financial services firm can make the most economical make/buy decision and avoid the ongoing costs of carrier-managed services. Private WDM networks can provide the availability needed for financial services organizations—where the cost of network downtime can easily exceed $1 million-per-hour. Advances in WDM technology provide the flexibility and scalability needed to economically support traffic growth, and WDM equipment can even offer programmable hardware that adapts to future needs with simple software downloads.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena's assured, adaptive network solution optimizes and switches traffic at the lowest possible layer to provide maximum throughput and the lowest latency. That means a single Wide Area Network (WAN) can empower a full mix of applications efficiently and reliably across the entire organization. As a network that is always available, never drops packets and delivers deterministic response, an adaptive optical network can help financial services firms move beyond overlapping, single-application networks to a more scalable, high-performance network that supports high-bandwidth, time-sensitive, mission-critical business processes. Financial services organizations can build WDM private networks using software-programmable WDM equipment that also allows smooth interoperability with storage systems to enable backup for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Benefits

• Five-9s (99.999%) and six-9s (99.9999%) availability to enable carrier-grade private WDM solutions
• Layer 1 isolation allows IT to consolidate all business traffic onto the same backbone yet maintain physically separate traffic streams to protect information and enable high-performance throughput
• Ciena's FlexiPort technology delivers software-programmable ports that minimize capital expenses and maximize flexibility and scalability
• Innovative time slot technology maximizes wavelength efficiency, allowing higher performance over the WAN for critical IT applications
• Ciena's ON-Center® Network and Service Management Suite simplifies private network management
• Ciena's Global Network Services organization is experienced in working with financial services organizations and has installed and maintained some of the world's largest optical networks