Network Design and Installation for Small and Medium Size Financial Institutions

Your network infrastructure provides the backbone for your business applications, front office pricing feeds and back office trading systems. As such it needs to be reliable, speedy and flexible.

A well designed network is key to achieving these aims. Depending on your individual business requirements it may be more appropriate to have servers in-house or to use a hosted server system “in the cloud”. In some cases a mixture of both scenarios is appropriate. Each type of setup has its own benefits and limitations. Connect Systems LLP have many years of experience in designing and implementing both types of solutions and so we can discuss with you which would best suit your business. The systems we design and install cover all the key business applications such as email, shared calendars, contacts, file storage, SQL databases, CRM systems, Accounts systems such as Sage and more.

As we have been working with small and medium sized financial services companies since 1992, we are well aware of the pricing feeds and back office systems that are needed and how these integrate into the network infrastructure. We regularly deal with the suppliers of these systems such as Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Fidessa, KTS, Proquote, Pershing, Third Financial, 1st Software and many others. We make sure that your network infrastructure is designed and scaled to accommodate the relevant suppliers’ requirements and that is offers a robust platform on which to run your business.

Remote access is a key issue for most businesses nowadays, providing connectivity for branch offices, home workers and those travelling. Connect Systems LLP design, supply and install industry-leading remote access solutions based on Citrix technologies. We also ensure that your network is configured to support mobile devices such as blackberries and iphones.

For businesses that require larger numbers of servers, we use server virtualisation technology, based on VMWare or XenServer, to allow multiple applications to run on a single piece of server hardware, thus reducing hardware costs, energy consumption and ongoing management and maintenance costs. This technology also has the benefit of vastly simplifying and speeding up disaster recovery processes, something which is covered in more depth in our Compliance section.

In some cases it will be appropriate to deploy a desktop virtualisation solution. In this scenario the user PCs are replaced by thin client devices and they connect to a desktop which is created at logon from one or more master images and runs on a back-end server. This technology has a number of advantages: the PCs are kept standard and locked down, the ongoing costs of management and deploying new terminals are minimal, all equipment is run from a reliable and secure back-end, software deployment and updates are vastly simplified and much more. This technology is something which is ideal for some businesses but unsuitable for others. Connect Systems LLP can discuss with you whether this technology would offer advantages to your business and if so we will carry out a free of charge proof-of-concept so that you can see the technology in action, using your own business applications, before you commit to expenditure.

Internet connectivity and resilience are key to any financial services firm with increasing numbers of trading and pricing systems being delivered over the web. Happily the cost of high speed symmetrical internet connections with service levels agreements has reduced dramatically in recent years, which means that there are plenty of good quality options available within the budgets of the SMB. We work with a number of ISPs including Easynet, Urban Wimax and Exponential-e and can recommend appropriate services – both primary lines and backups – to suit your business.
We can recommend, install and configure firewall solutions from vendors including Watchguard and Cisco to ensure the highest level of security on your network. In addition we can recommend, install and manage your anti-virus, anti-spam, email filtering, web monitoring and filtering solutions.

Backup is often an issue that is overlooked or inadequate. There are options for local backup to disk and/or tape and in some – but not all - cases online backup is a good solution. Once we have a good understanding of your applications and data volumes we will make a recommendation as to the best option.

Once we have put together a proposed design and costings for your network we will discuss it with you and fine tune it as necessary. When you are happy to go ahead we will agree a timeframe for the work. One of our experienced project managers will put together a detailed project plan in conjunction with our engineers and will oversee the works to ensure that the completed project delivers the defined benefits and is implemented to time and to budget.

Have a look at some of our Case Studies to get a flavour of some of the projects we have successfully implemented.