By Colette Kitterhing, Senior Director UK&I at Riverbed Technology

As the global pandemic continues, the majority of Europe is facing one of the most challenging economic periods on record. In fact, according to PWC, most CFOs anticipate the disruption to have a significant effect on their bottom line, with more than half (53%) expecting a decrease in revenue and/or profits of up to 25% as a result. With this in mind, it is more crucial than ever for financial organisations to ensure their business operations are as efficient as possible and that employee productivity remains high, in order to maintain growth and success in the coming months.

From changes in consumer behaviour and revenue reductions, to continued remote working, there are a lot of moving factors that financial institutions need to constantly assess and take into consideration. One of the key priorities amongst these is ensuring they have the right technologies in place to successfully sustain productivity, enable innovation and drive business growth. However, according to recent research from Riverbed, almost half (44%) of finance business decision makers state that slow running and outdated technology is currently impacting their business. As one of the biggest industries in the UK, this has to change. If the finance industry does not adopt the right technology to support new ways of working, it will not only have a detrimental impact on their productivity levels and ability to thrive in the new business normal, but will also more broadly affect societal economic recovery.

Leaving the office and working from anywhere 

As with the majority of businesses, across all sectors, financial institutions have been forced to rethink operations entirely. Traditionally this sector as a whole has typically relied on legacy infrastructure, primarily due to the stringent regulations financial organisations must adhere to. This has made the financial sector much slower to adopt the technology and initiatives that enable employees to work from anywhere. But in order to keep employees safe, and follow government guidelines throughout the pandemic, a shift has to be made — and they have to adopt new technologies. The question is, what does the right technology look like?

The business need for the right technology

To maintain success in today’s fast paced and hyper-fluctuant business landscape, financial institutions need to embrace emerging technology and use it as a foundation to enable effective business continuity. This is particularly important as employees remain, per government guidelines, advised to work from home and as a result becomes more challenging for businesses to ensure operations run smoothly. In the past few months, businesses have reported struggling with the lack of visibility into employee activity, and this has resulted in increased technical disruptions (40%) and weaker employee productivity (37%), as revealed in Riverbed’s recent research. It is therefore vital that the technology financial organisations adopt addresses this if they are to succeed in today’s constantly evolving environment.

Having the right technology in place will bring significant benefit to the IT teams within these financial institutions. Armed with efficient and reliable tools to monitor employee activity as well as network and application performance, IT teams can effectively identify and troubleshoot problems before they arise and help drive productivity up across the workforce. In turn, this ability to positively impact the productivity of employees enables IT teams to successfully evidence the return of investment that having the correct tools in place provides to the business as a whole.

The continued shift to a more distributed workforce and the need for IT teams to successfully ensure employee productivity remains, are two factors that fundamentally require investment into the right technology that can provide a comprehensive and complete visibility over the network.

Visibility and performance is key

Riverbed’s research also revealed that 97% of IT and business decision makers in the finance industry believe that innovation and breaking boundaries is crucial to the success of financial businesses. It is therefore paramount that businesses adopt technology that allows holistic visibility into the networks so that IT teams can quickly troubleshoot problems, source where security issues are occurring and resolve any capacity issues. To do this, financial institutions need to invest in network performance management (NPM) solutions that collects and analyses the data flowing through every application on every device. With this insight, IT teams can swiftly understand what problems are occurring and take action to rectify them, irrespective of whether employees are operating from the office or remotely. This may include adopting application acceleration tools which alleviate network latency and bandwidth related issues, enabling employees to work more efficiently and effectively.

In any situation, but particularly during times of disruption, poor network performance has a serious impact on productivity as employees struggle to overcome latency and bandwidth challenges. In turn, this has a huge impact on the efficiency of business operations, resulting in possible loss of clients and an inability to attain new contracts. However, with effective technology in place such as network performance tools and application accelerators, this can be easily prevented. In fact, 81% of IT decision makers and business decision makers in the finance sector see visibility into network and application performance as key to both staff retention and business innovation.

Navigating turbulent times with technology  

As uncertainty caused by the pandemic continues, financial institutions need to have the technology in place that will successfully support and enable them to respond to change quickly and with agility. By embracing tools that not only enhance network visibility and performance but also maximise application performance, financial organisations can feel assured that they can overcome any network issues, maintain employee productivity and ultimately drive the business innovation that is needed to thrive in today’s challenging business landscape.