The pace of technological change is possibly the biggest challenge that financial institutions are facing says Cisco FinTech Lead Al Slamecka. He says that the large financial organizations are zeroing in on automating the network management functions and the operations side of their businesses, which they call Intent-Based Networking.

Al Slamecka, Financial Services Industry Lead at Cisco, discussed the challenges institutions are facing because of all that is currently going on in the FinTech space with Investor’s Business Daily:

Financial Institutions Struggle With Pace of Technological Change

The pace of change is probably the biggest thing large financial institutions struggle with. They continually face the pressures of seeing a lot of what’s going on from the FinTech space. As large organizations, they are continuing to try to evolve the way that they as a provider of a significant number of services can accelerate their innovation and accelerate their transformation. In that regard, from our perspective, there’s a lot that is dependent on their ability to provide greater automation and orchestration of the underlying infrastructure.

Organizations Focusing on Intent-Based Networking

We’re starting to see a lot more organizations look at the capabilities of automating the network management function and the operations side of the business, something that is typically called Intent-Based Networking. Essentially this accelerates their ability to allow the organization to be more agile from an application development perspective and from a partnership perspective with FinTech firms. There’s good momentum in that space currently. It’s an interesting time for them but we think that those organizations that are taking that fundamental view at their infrastructure are well on their way.

Software Defined Networking is the Preferred Approach

These are large institutions and so over the years, they’ve developed large complex networks to service their business. The challenge is one in which they need to get out of the business of doing what they used to do. Things like command line execution of management functions have been a real time-staking task, so to deploy automation they need more intelligence out of the solutions they deploy. Software Defined Networking is generally the approach that they’re taking both from the data center side, software-defined data center, as well software-defined campus and WAN.

There’s a transition in the products that support that and they need to essentially upgrade their infrastructure with products that have the intelligence to provide the kind of visibility and manageability that they need. Then they also need to look at their own capabilities inside, the talent inside the IT organizations needs transformation as well. So there’s an upgrade both on the operational side as well as on the infrastructure and technology side.