The financial services industry, with its volatile markets, ever-tightening regulation, vast amounts of data, stringent security and data-availability demands, is hungry for high-bandwidth and high-resilience business continuity solutions.

By enabling data to be accessible wherever it’s needed, we’ve found ourselves in demand.

Business continuity: Trading against all odds

Fast, high-capacity data links are the best way of insuring against the unthinkable. Today, a power cut, or trading floor shutdown can now be successfully tackled by moving your traders to backup trading ‘bunkers’. These are connected to your data storage facility, many miles away, via networks operating at gigabit speeds.

With our High Capacity Services delivering connections with up to 40Gb of bandwidth from one end of the country to the other, distance from the data centre becomes irrelevant. The solution is to back up your data where capacity and price make the best sense. Often, that means out of town. Our National Ethernet product brings the same type of benefit, but at speeds up to 1Gb - and at a price guaranteed to make smaller organisations smile.

Data access and retrieval: Total recall

With increasingly tough data management regulations, storing data securely and retrieving it quickly can sometimes seem an impossible challenge. Especially when you’re trying to achieve both affordably. We’ll deliver high spec data centres sited in cost effective locations, powerfully linked with super-efficient, gigabit connections to the offices that require access to the data. Add IP Voice to the mix and it’s not just compliance you’re achieving, you’re cutting costs, improving resilience and boosting call centre flexibility too.

Site-to-Site Connectivity links all your sites together and, with our Class of Service (CoS) technology available for broadband access, even the remotest branches can run high quality voice services over the network. IP Multimedia eliminates the need for a separate IP voice network and adds sophisticated capabilities. For example, your people can log on at any site and still be reached on the same extension number. For phone meetings, every user can have a personal conference call number. All of which cuts travel costs and raises productivity.

Business efficiencies: Geography is history

Connectivity across distances used to be a real headache. Today, it’s a key opportunity for cost saving, business transformation and gaining the edge. Because, thanks to our ultra high bandwidth, resilient national network reach, your data can literally be anywhere and everywhere. Take the opportunity to consolidate resources, for example - concentrate multiple server farms into two mirrored installations to simultaneously cut overhead and boost data availability.

Our Ethernet VPN and IPVPN change the financial dynamics of networking. It’s now more cost effective to build a national multi-site VPN network than one based on point-to-point connections. On top of that, you get the performance you need to run cutting-edge converged applications, plus the flexibility to scale to previously unimaginable bandwidths. IP Multimedia, IP CCTV and other applications can be simultaneously delivered across the network, further boosting payback on your investment.