The financial services industry is in a race to leverage technology. The future belongs to the companies that can best utilize tools to gather, analyze, and remediate based on the information they receive. Legacy monitoring solutions are outpaced by the speed and complexity of the modern IT environment. They lack the scalability, adaptability, and integration to support the financial services industry's complex IT infrastructure and initiatives, stringent security requirements, and dynamic threat landscape.
WanAware presents the new paradigm shift in Intelligent Observability, purpose-built to address the unique challenges faced by the financial services industry. This informational paper explains the technological underpinnings of WanAware and explores the platform's role in shaping the future of Intelligent Observability.
The Knowledge Discovery Engine (KDE): The Foundation of WanAware and The 3 Pillars of WanAware
At the heart of WanAware lies the Knowledge Discovery Engine (KDE) which drives WanAware’s Intelligent Observability capabilities. The KDE is built on a foundation of:
- Massive Data Lakes: The KDE aggregates and processes diverse datasets, encompassing asset inventories, performance metrics, security vulnerabilities, and network topology. These massive data lakes are designed to handle data streams for up to 100 billion assets simultaneously.
- AI and ML: The KDE leverages advanced AI and ML algorithms to analyze data, identify patterns, and predict potential issues. This enables proactive management and automated remediation, minimizing downtime and optimizing resource utilization.
- Rules Engine: A customizable rules engine processes data based on predefined conditions, enabling automated remediation and proactive management.
- Graph Database: A graph database maps the adjacency of resources, providing a visual representation of asset connectivity and data flows across the internet.
The KDE powers WanAware's capabilities across its three core pillars: Performance, Availability, and Security.
- Performance: WanAware's approach to performance monitoring is based on real-time data collection and analysis of every IP address on the planet. This allows WanAware to detect degraded performance and identify issues on different network paths, providing a much more granular and insightful approach to performance monitoring than legacy tools.
- Availability: WanAware ensures asset availability by monitoring every IP address for performance, availability, and security. When an outage occurs, WanAware can identify the exact path and location of the failure. By understanding the asset as a whole, classifying the priority of issues more accurately, and providing automatic remediation, WanAware offers a more comprehensive and efficient approach to ensuring asset availability.
- Security: WanAware scans every IP address on the internet daily, covering both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. The platform leverages NMAP's list of the "Top 1000 Ports" to optimize its scanning process, striking a balance between comprehensive coverage and efficient scanning. Upon identifying open ports, WanAware performs vulnerability scans and fingerprinting to identify potential risks. This information is then used to provide actionable insights, rather than overwhelming users with a flood of critical vulnerabilities. The platform, through the KDE, considers compensating controls and the context in which the asset is being used, reducing false positives and providing more relevant information.
Addressing the Specific Needs of the Financial Services Industry
WanAware's capabilities are particularly well-suited to address the specific risks and challenges of the financial services industry.
- Regulatory Compliance: Financial institutions are subject to a complex web of regulations, including PCI DSS, SOX, and GLBA. WanAware can help financial institutions meet these regulatory requirements by providing comprehensive visibility into their IT infrastructure, identifying potential security vulnerabilities, and automating remediation workflows. For example, WanAware automatically detects and reports on devices that do not meet PCI DSS standards, such as those with outdated software or unencrypted data.
- Fraud Prevention: Financial institutions are constantly at risk of fraud. WanAware can help to prevent fraud by monitoring network traffic for suspicious activity, identifying anomalies, and alerting security teams to potential threats. For instance, WanAware pinpoints unusual patterns of data access or login attempts, which may indicate fraudulent activity.
- Data Security: Protecting sensitive customer data is paramount for financial institutions. WanAware's robust security features, including vulnerability scanning, threat detection, and Zero Trust principles, help financial institutions safeguard their data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks. WanAware identifies and prioritizes vulnerabilities based on their severity and potential impact, allowing security teams to focus their efforts on the most critical threats.
- Business Continuity: Downtime can be costly for financial institutions. WanAware's proactive monitoring and remediation capabilities help to minimize downtime and ensure business continuity. WanAware automatically recognizes and assists in rerouting traffic around network outages, ensuring that critical applications and services remain available.
- Meeting the Needs of a Complex Market: The financial services industry is complex and requires technology that can keep up with its needs. WanAware's platform is designed to meet these needs with the ability to monitor and remediate issues in real-time, allowing for proactive problem-solving and faster resolution times. For instance, WanAware automatically alerts you to adjustments required on network configurations or resource allocation in response to changing market conditions, ensuring optimal performance and stability.
The Power of Historical and Predictive Intelligence and Asset Inventory Management
A key differentiator for WanAware is the ability to leverage historical and predictive intelligence. WanAware’s massive data lakes store information on over 10 billion globally connected IP addresses, refreshing every four hours. This data provides a rich historical context for understanding asset behavior, enabling the KDE to identify anomalies and predict potential issues more accurately. For example, if a server consistently experiences high latency during peak hours, WanAware learns this pattern and proactively allocates additional resources to prevent performance degradation. Similarly, if a network device has a history of security vulnerabilities, WanAware prioritizes patching and remediation efforts to minimize risk.
WanAware's no-cost Asset Inventory Management (AIM) system addresses the challenge of maintaining accurate and up-to-date inventories of IT Connected Assets. The platform integrates with various tools and platforms, including cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google), VMware, and EDR tools, to ingest asset data and build a comprehensive asset map and real-time inventory.. AIM also allows for the ingestion of architectural diagrams, enabling it to understand asset relationships and network connections. This provides a holistic view of the IT environment, exceeding the capabilities of "off the shelf" asset management solutions.
The Future of Intelligent Observability
WanAware is not simply at the forefront of a new era in Intelligent Observability – it is defining that era. WanAware’s revolutionary approach, combining massive data lakes, AI and ML, a rules-based approach, and a graph database, provides financial institutions with unprecedented clarity and control over their complex IT infrastructure. By leveraging WanAware's capabilities, these institutions:
- Proactively identify and mitigate threats before they impact operations.
- Ensure business continuity with real-time monitoring and automated remediation.
- Meet the stringent demands of regulatory compliance with comprehensive visibility and control.
- Unlock the full potential of their IT infrastructure to drive innovation and achieve sustainable growth.
WanAware is not just a strategic partner – it is a competitive necessity. WanAware delivers a paradigm shift in how financial institutions manage risk, ensure compliance, and optimize performance.
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