With more applications in their kitty than an typical
enterprise, extensive branch networks and increasing reliance on
Web, banks and financial institutions must form the ideal prospects
for you as a vendor. Tell us about your focus on the BFSI
sector.
The BFSI sector has always been of tremendous interest to us as
a vendor. In fact Government and BFSI verticals put together form
the bulk of our business, here in India. Even now, if you were to
look at our customer pipeline, you would see that most of them are
from the BFSI space. And it's not that difficult to imagine why
either. As you said it yourself, banks tend to have application
environments which are far more complex and demanding than most
other enterprises. The nature of their business is such that these
applications need to be available 24/7. Customers and internal
users both need to be able to access them without any disruptions
or performance issues. You've got highly distributed branch
networks which need to be able to connect with central locations in
a secure and reliable manner. Then there's the issue of compliance
and regulatory mandates which force banks to secure access to
sensitive banking and customer data. For all these reasons and more
banks make the perfect prospects for us and we can help them meet
all their application delivery and secure access demands with our
offerings.
Typically when you engage with prospects from the BFSI
vertical, what do you hear from them in terms of their key pain
areas?
Pain areas for banking and finance companies exist on both
fronts i.e. security as well as application delivery. From a
security perspective there is a challenge in terms of securing the
applications and desktops both at the central and remote locations.
In most cases, the scenario tends to be particularly bad at remote
locations where users don’t always comply with the existing
security policies. This is also aided by the fact that remote
locations don’t always have local IT resources available to
them. In their bid to achieve compliance and cost effective branch
operations, banks in recent times have begun replacing fat desktop
PCs with thin clients which don’t have local OS and memory.
Using these terminals users connect to a central location where the
applications and data is hosted. However, to facilitate secure and
reliable access banks require a strong SSL encryption based
appliance that is easy to configure, use, and manage. So
that’s another area of concern for banks. Besides this, the
rise of mobile workforce within the banking sector has also led to
challenges of securing the end-points before they connect to the
corporate VPN.
On the application delivery side, a couple of recent
developments have forced the banks to think more seriously about
the issue. One is the mandate to upgrade all the SSL transactions
from 1024-bit to 2048-bit encryption which puts a lot of strain on
server performance. With servers not being able to handle the
stress, application performance issues are bound to occur. This
challenge is further compounded by the growing popularity of online
channels and use of various devices for accessing banking
applications and services.
Increasingly we find application security and delivery
disciplines converging. How are you addressing this through your
offerings?
At Array Networks, we propose an integrated approach to
application optimization and security. We integrate things like
server load balancing, global server load balancing, link load
balancing, application firewall, connection multiplexing, SSL
acceleration, compression, and caching all into one platform, which
can be clustered for redundancy and scalability.
In terms of security, the Array appliance contains several
built-in security mechanisms to protect web servers and
applications from attack. We offer access control lists; protection
against syn-flood attacks, fragmentation, and DDoS attacks; and
stateful packet inspection as well as single packet attack
prevention. This level of content integrity reduces the need for
third party firewalls and multiple DMZs. In addition to this, our
ADC’s offer application content filtering, access method
control, and URL filtering capabilities. On the delivery side, we
rely on technologies like clustering, SSL acceleration, and
compression techniques. We offer technologies like connection
multiplexing. In a typical scenario, as the number of connections
to a server increase, the server performance tends to degrade as it
starts to run out of resources. Connection multiplexing converts a
large number of short connections into a much smaller number of
higher-throughput connections.
In essence, we build enough “intelligence” in our
appliances so that users don't have to invest in any other point
products. Our single, integrated approach to how applications are
delivered addresses the issue in a much more comprehensive
manner.
Enabling Cost-Cutting Initiatives with eGRC
How Organizations have a solid eGRC approach, supported by the right technology, are better suited to manage a lean organization
Keep yourself updated on latest news and articles from the BFSI segment