How to speed up banking business innovation through comprehensive real-time monitoring?

In recent years, with the gradual deepening of the Internet and artificial intelligence, the development of financial technology, and especially the popularization of mobile applications, the digital intensity of financial scenarios and the digital breadth of financial business have been expanding rapidly, and every practitioner has been caught up in it.

For banks, the first change is the gradual shift from offline outlets to online outlets. After the epidemic, the change is even more obvious, and the offline outlets of banks, which have already been impacted, are facing more challenges.

Such changes are also directly reflected in the changes in the number of bank tellers.

Behind the reduction in the number of bank tellers

2019 was an extraordinary year for the front-end bank branch model of banks, and the number of branches was greatly reduced. According to statistics, the total number of branches of the six major banks in the country decreased by 836 in 2019, and the total number of employees of the six major banks decreased by 11,500. As of July 2020, 1,730 bank branches across the country have ceased operations.

The reduction in the number of tellers also reflects the significant increase in the off-counter business rate of major banks.

According to the China Banking Data Association, the off-counter transaction rate in the banking industry was close to 90% in 2020, while this figure was only 54.37% in 2012.

In the past ten years, the off-counter transaction rate has increased by 36%, which has resulted in a reduction of 40,000 ATMs nationwide in 2021 and the closure of 6,275 bank branches in 2020. At this rate, it can be foreseen that offline bank branches will continue to decline in the future.

At the same time, with the obvious increase in the off-counter business rate, challenges have also followed.

Difficulties in Improving User Experience for Banks

Take a bank client served by Borei Data as an example.

First, the era of big data has accelerated banks' exploration of scenario-based, intelligent, and online business. More and more banks have begun to realize that future commercial banks need to extract value from data, and use high-quality data and strong data analysis capabilities to support accelerated innovation in all scenarios of financial business in order to gain sustained industrial competitiveness.

On June 10, with the implementation of the Data Security Law, data security will be elevated to a more important position, which will be a huge challenge for most banks.

In addition, the country currently attaches great importance to network security and ensures network security by conducting attack and defense drills. During important events, banks are very likely to be targeted. Therefore, for banks, the security requirements for their official websites and key websites are extremely high. Once the data is hijacked or tampered with, the consequences are difficult to predict.
Secondly, as bank branches gradually moved online, new systems were frequently launched, and the workload of verifying changes such as large-scale system cutovers and network switches was huge and consumed a lot of manpower.

Third, in the process of digital transformation of banks, due to insufficient security construction and a small number of operation and maintenance personnel, as the number of online outlets gradually increases, maintaining the stability of the website and troubleshooting have become a major problem. When problems occur, the manpower cost of system fault troubleshooting and location is high, the troubleshooting cycle is long, and challenges such as downtime caused by complex faults will directly affect the user experience.

Fourth, with the trend of comprehensively building IPv6 network infrastructure, the deployment of IPv6-compatible Web services has evolved into a top-down mandatory compliance requirement, and banks are no exception.

However, in the process of deploying IPv6, it is necessary to compare the performance of IPv6 with that of traditional IPv4, including system construction and optimization. If there is a lack of accurate performance data, it will be difficult to improve the score, and it will be difficult for operators to determine where the problem lies.

In summary, the bank's problems mainly include the following four points: a real-time monitoring mechanism is needed during the security period; the traditional manual system change verification is time-consuming and high-risk; the troubleshooting cycle is long and manpower consumption is high; the IPv6 transformation ranking needs to be improved urgently.

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How to speed up innovation in banking business?

Based on the above problems, Borei Data found that the main problem of the bank was the need to improve its ability to monitor and analyze the IT operation and maintenance system in real time, thereby strengthening the security and stability of the IT system and optimizing and transforming IPv6 to improve its ranking.

As a leading IT operation and maintenance company with many years of experience in the financial industry, Borei Data developed a set of effective solutions based on the bank's pain points. That is, Borei Data's Internet monitoring solution conducted a comprehensive real-time monitoring of the bank from top to bottom, greatly improving the efficiency of operation and maintenance work.

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First, in terms of daily availability monitoring, Borei Data proactively discovered problems by conducting daily monitoring of the bank's main Internet applications, thereby ensuring the normal usage experience of all types of users and the normal operation of electronic channel-related businesses.

During major events, in order to avoid policy risks, based on active dialing products, by configuring the URL address of the task to be monitored, black and white list monitoring of DNS resolution addresses, page element review and sensitive content auditing are implemented, hijacking phenomena are proactively discovered, and real-time alarms are issued, allowing customers to immediately understand the hijacking phenomenon and the scope of impact.

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Second, in terms of the bank's platform cutover verification, a monitoring plan was developed one day in advance based on the system cutover or network switching content, and the URL, scope, frequency, etc. that need to be tested were determined. The monitoring baseline during normal operation was obtained. During the online process, the impact of the cutover on the business and the recovery status were determined. Focused monitoring or immediate testing was initiated for problems in the cutover to determine the cause of the problem and the scope of impact. Based on the monitoring results, it was determined whether the cutover was successful and whether a rollback was required. If a rollback is required, the monitoring task results are also required to determine whether the rollback is successful.

Compared with traditional cutover verification monitoring results, Bonree net helps customers reduce verification time to minutes, and has digital and precise evaluation to accurately locate the scope of faults.

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Third, in response to major system failures, Borei Data provides temporary emergency services to meet all requirements of troubleshooting and emergency response, reducing the ability to discover and analyze problems to minutes, greatly reducing the workload of operation and maintenance personnel.

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Fourth, in the process of improving the IPv6 transformation ranking, through the continuous monitoring of the bank's IPv6-related websites by Borei Data, the bank was helped to purposefully discover the problems with the IPv6 website and optimize it based on the data, ensuring the stable operation of the bank's IPv6 website and helping it to rank among the top in the financial industry in terms of IPv6 website performance.

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Comprehensive real-time monitoring helps improve business value

In summary, the business value brought to the bank through comprehensive real-time monitoring by Borui Data can be summarized into the following four aspects:

1. Avoiding security risks in external business:
During major events such as the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Party, the security of the IPv4/IPv6 pages of multiple systems, including the bank's official website, was ensured.

2. Automated change verification improves business continuity:
Achieve nationwide verification of automated business changes, reduce the time required for each round of verification to minutes, and enable the operation and maintenance team to diagnose and locate faults within 5 minutes.

3. Improve fault diagnosis efficiency and reduce MTTR:
The average time consumption for troubleshooting and locating faults is reduced to minutes, and the MTTR is reduced to minutes, effectively meeting the requirements for business continuity.

4. Help improve the ranking of IPv6 transformation industry:
The availability of IPv6 pages has been effectively improved. After optimization, the bank ranks among the top in the financial industry on the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology IPv6 website performance rankings.