Solutions Industries

Computer Networks for the Financial Industry

Financial Services are experiencing several trends that impact IT, both from within the business organization and from external sources. These trends impact both the regional bank organizations and the larger investment firms.

In the regional space, competition to gain and retain customers drives investment in mobile banking, data protection, and remote services, while cutting fees and applying new regulations that lessen bank income. Acquisitions and mergers keep IT organizations busy through data consolidation and integration. In the near future, some banking organizations are looking to replace human tellers with kiosks which handle the majority of walk-in traffic. This will reduce the number of people on staff, but for IT, it will increase the data load and services required to support these systems.

Larger investment firms continue to spend enormous amounts of money to achieve ultra-low latency in trading services, gaining a competitive edge with every nanosecond saved from application response times. With the huge move to mobility and custom applications, these firms are finding ways to keep their investors connected and trading around the clock. With network and application performance in these environments, the unexpected is unacceptable. IT organizations are expected to have complete visibility at all hours, capturing everything, everywhere – 24/7.

Federal Government

Federal agencies face unprecedented pressures from a rapidly evolving technology landscape, rising public expectations and the need to operate securely in an increasingly interconnected world. At the same time, Congress is reining in spending, forcing agencies toward flat or declining budgets. In this challenging environment, agencies are shifting investments from costly maintenance and operation of legacy IT systems to 21st-century solutions that leverage shareable technologies, and they’re redirecting infrastructure investments from a traditional network-centric approach to a more user-centric model.

Healthcare Industry Computer Network Systems

The healthcare industry is going through tremendous change due to the automation of patient care, causing huge impacts on IT organizations. The entire system managing the interaction between healthcare professionals and patients is dramatically evolving, and will completely impact the way a hospital does business.

Instead of tracking patients with a file folder and a clip board, many hospitals and clinics are being required to adopt the use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). A fully implemented EMR system allows electronic storage, retrieval, and modification of patient information, allowing departments within the health organization to collaborate when providing care. In hospitals and clinics, these federally backed (in the United States and Canada) EMR systems will replace hundreds of different applications used by physicians, radiology personnel, and even hospital administration.There is tremendous pressure on IT departments to implement and support EMRsystems, allowing hospitals and clinics to take advantage of incentive programs and stimulus money.

Radiology departments are doing away with old film-based equipment and are now using Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) to electronically store, display, and transfer large digital images to any department or organization that may need them. Clinics are trending toward software as a service (SaaS) and remote hosting services to support these patient systems, rather than suffering the expense of bringing them in-house.

Mobility continues to trend upward in healthcare, as doctors make use of tablet devices at the bedside to access Computerized Physician Order Entry systems (CPOE). These orders are communicated over thenetwork to the medical staff in other departments, such as radiology, giving them treatment instructions on a specific patient. After these large images are captured, they are stored and made available for analysis by the physician, even at the bedside.