Part one of this network series highlighted some recent network incidents that impacted the internet and public cloud providers and proliferated the wariness of public cloud. There’s no doubt that outage occurrences will continue to take place across the globe.

Bad actors

Financial firms need to be particularly security conscious due to the sensitive nature of customer data. As such, this second edition article will explore the more nefarious side of unavailability and, more specifically, the consequences financial businesses may face because of security vulnerabilities.

The most renowned incident happened in 2016, when Domain Name System (DNS) provider, Dyn, was targeted by hackers with multiple Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This attack used the Mirai botnet, causing major swaths of the internet to be unavailable in the US and Europe for an entire working day.

Purposeful and harmful outages – both large and small scale – are occurring at an ever-increasing rate, for example:

• In November 2016, a hacker used the same Mirai botnet to cripple internet connectivity across the nation of Liberia and in parts of Germany
• Fibre cuts by vandals took down internet access for some New York City residents who used Spectrum, two separate times: June 2017 and November 2017 
• In April 2018, an unknown party cut the lone subsea cable that connects the African nation of Mauritania to the internet, causing a total internet outage for 48 hours, followed by an extended restoration period 

One of the most alarming trends in this area is the host of bad actors and incidents where national infrastructure – such as power plants, shipping terminals, etc.– is targeted. It appears criminals are taking advantage of outdated and unsecured infrastructure with the intention to cause legitimate public safety issues. Moreover, banks and financial firms are – and will continue to be – another key target to hackers and criminals.

How can businesses continue to get access to public cloud power during an internet outage?

Of course, the internet isn’t as unstable as projected here. Many of these are isolated incidents, but the frequency and scope of these outages is growing and is of legitimate concern to anyone who is putting business critical applications and personal data onto public cloud servers. This is particularly poignant as we reach the year anniversary of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which threatens businesses with large fines.

On top of this worry, financial firms need to plan for eventualities where their internet connection goes down and there is a trading emergency. Financial markets participants need to find a way to get to their public cloud environment to handle the issue. Even when an internet connection is available, there are myriad other issues that can cause pain points. The internet has no performance guarantees, there are no service level agreements (SLAs) around uptime or latency. Further, there’s no single vendor for you to work with to isolate and troubleshoot your connectivity issues.

The rise of network technology in financial services

Today, financial firms have the option to deploy advanced network technology that can overlay SLAs where there are none, as well as providing around the clock reliability and support, an essential for those trading with global locations.

Best-of-breed network connectivity solutions enable access to the public cloud by utilising secure private cloud connectivity to get there. These private cloud connections can reach across a plethora of cloud service providers (CSPs) and public clouds from only one secure connection.

Indeed, fully managed Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solutions are enabling many financial firms point-of-presence access in hundreds of locations globally. Using multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) or reliable fixed line backbones, traders and other market participants can establish private network capabilities into their offices – wherever they might be located around the world – and use those connections to connect to AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or any of the other public cloud providers.

As such, many financial firms no longer have to compromise to embrace the cloud. With new and exciting fintech solutions arriving every day, many security- and regulatory-conscious financial firms are turning to NaaS to take advantage of all the flexibility and agility of the public cloud, while also benefitting from the security and reliability capabilities of private cloud solutions.