FinTech has evolved from startups that want to take on and beat incumbents, to a broader ecosystem of different businesses looking for partnerships to meet increasingly complex customer needs. As the interconnections between these partnerships and their customers increase in complexity, the risk of potential security issues increases as well. To address this problem, Aaron Spradlin, founder and CEO of cleverDome, inc. ™ had an idea. He could partner with the leaders in network security, endpoint protection, and various financial services organizations focused on secure transactions and systems to establish the fundamental model for the future of financial networks: the unification of end-point protection with a secure communication layer under a common due-diligence standard.
Technical tools and services are critical for the financial services industry and at the T3 Enterprise Conference , CEOs, CTOs, COOs, CCOs (and direct support staff) from broker/dealers, OSJ branch offices, large RIA firms, advisor networks, and other financial services firms are learning about the best of the best technology and enterprise solutions for their industry.
At this year’s October 30th, 2017 event, cleverDome announced a new solution to address security and compliance requirements for the financial services community. While leveraging the internet for connectivity, cleverDome, powered by NetFoundry, takes the community “under the dome” of security and optimizations to protect members, data, assets, and ultimately clients.
NetFoundry creates an isolated private network for each application – we call it an AppWAN (Application WAN). By design, NetFoundry AppWANs enable secure overlay networks for each app across the public Internet without requiring specialized hardware, private telco circuits or VPNs. Not only is each AppWAN highly secure by design, the NetFoundry service continuously monitors various Quality of Experience metrics (e.g. jitter, delay, throughput, and others) and adapts to these changing conditions in real-time to select new “best paths” through the NetFoundry global network fabric to ensure maximum application performance and responsiveness.
FinTech Demands Network Agility
An emerging fintech requirement is the need for on-demand global networks that can be turned up instantly and managed via centralized web consoles and APIs. The financial services community cannot be impeded by time-consuming service roll-outs for legacy technologies like MPLS, dedicated private telco circuits, or custom networking hardware. They need agility, flexibility and control over their technical tools and services so they can do what they do best – provide timely and relevant financial consulting and services to their customers. NetFoundry enables customers to “spin-up” fintech networks on-demand using an intuitive web-based console and APIs.
Under the Hood: A Partnership Set to Transform the Internet
Software from Dispersive Technologies, Inc is one of the key ingredients in the broader NetFoundry platform which we use to power financial extranets such as cleverDome. Just as IaaS solutions such as Amazon AWS provide customers with compute-on-demand, by integrating multiple technology providers “under the hood”, the end customer doesn’t need to try to find and integrate all the ingredients. NetFoundry’s platform enables our customers to simply define the business requirements for their networking needs, while the platform invokes whichever technologies are needed, such as Dispersive.
NetFoundry licenses Dispersive software to help provide security and performance for each AppWAN. The results are extraordinary – NetFoundry was selected to power the cleverDome solution to meet the rigorous security, compliance, and performance requirements of the fintech and financial services communities.
One unique and innovative capability that Dispersive provides to NetFoundry is the ability to split sessions into smaller packets so that users have multiple streams across different paths for each AppWAN session.
- Performance: Dispersive combines its dynamic, split-session multi-path routing across one or more physical circuits with simultaneous, multivariate QoE and optimization schemes. Since each session is split, all available connections can use broadband, WiFi, 4G/5G, etc. You get increased throughput by being able to optimally use any connection, especially when more than one is available, as the software treats all of the connections as one logical pipe. When performance issues are detected, these independent streams instantly adapt, adjust, and automatically roll to new paths to improve application performance.
- Security: As user sessions are split and independent paths are selected, each packet stream is encrypted with a unique FIPS 140-2 compliant key and each stream is sent on a different path to thwart man-in-the-middle attacks. As an overlay solution, it obscures the original source and destination for each session and stream, shifting potential attacks away from the end customer. Additionally, by rolling away from problems, the solution is able to defeat DoS and DDoS attacks. The software authenticates users before providing access and can micro-segment networks by the user, port, protocol and application. Finally, Dispersive listens for connections and any unexpected or outside connections are silently denied, by default.
With 28 patents granted and more on the way, Dispersive Technologies is clearly an innovation leader and a key ingredient in our NetFoundry platform, used for many of the AppWANs which require the layered security which Dispersive helps provide.
Powerful security requires a multi-layered approach, and NetFoundry combines the leading Dispersive technology with our software defined perimeter (SDP) and identity access management (IAM) solutions, while harnessing integrations with other third parties such as endpoint security, to ensure multi-faceted, defense-in-depth peace of mind.
