This company is a global mobile Fintech solutions developer with offices in 9 countries spread over three continents. From 2005, when it was founded, the company grew to serve over 340 million customers worldwide by 2016, additionally boasting of 18 million monthly active users.
To support this large user base, it deployed servers at multiple regions. These servers were also deployed at data centers leased from multiple companies.
As a business still experiencing rapid growth, the mobile Fintech solutions developer was then faced with several challenges. The most apparent were its ease of scalability when server traffic spiked or reduced, and the absence of resources to manage an effective data recovery plan.
All these either meant incompetence of the business to maintain its growth or total loss of core business data when disaster struck.
The company’s plan to launch a new Fintech project made a solution to its current situation a more pressing need. The failure of the new Fintech project meant newly purchased servers would be utterly wasted. How was all this solved?

Amazon Web Services was the go-to solution, as the cloud infrastructure offered exactly what the mobile Fintech solutions developer needed.
The scalability of cloud frameworks meant that the failure of the new project simply warranted a reduction of deployed AWS virtual servers, helping to reduce costs. Additionally, the global coverage, multifunctionality, and professional-grade services of AWS meant the company could shift its whole infrastructure to the cloud.
The results? The mobile Fintech solutions developer successfully created an active disaster recovery framework that covered all its core business operations around the world. It also did all these while expanding further into Europe and Asia, and keeping mobile Fintech solutions at the usual top-notch levels.

The result from this case study only proves that switching to cloud-based infrastructures is one way of reducing complexity in your business. This is especially so for fast-growing enterprises that urgently need to scale operations up.
Do you see a similarity with Fintech companies? They exist in an industry that is fast growing and expected to double in participation over the next 5 years. This means more users, increased traffic on existing infrastructure, and a definite need to scale up in the future.
Looking at this, we can say building the foundations of your Fintech company on cloud infrastructures allows you to stay ahead of your competitors when the market is ripe for harvest.

Data centers belonging to a single cloud provider, like AWS Cloud, are usually located around the globe to support a worldwide customer base. Now, different countries have different data protection laws, and these multi-national data center distributions create a conflict of law and certain additional issues.
For instance, there are strict limitations to the mobility of data generated from EU jurisdictions to other jurisdictions. Subcontracting makes this scenario even worse, as when a CSP (communications service providers) leverages the services of another CSP, confusion arises on the exact jurisdiction to be applied. This serves as a major roadblock in case legal action from a user is warranted.

There’s no universal solution to mitigating risks with CSP jurisdiction, and this is unsurprisingly due to different countries running under different laws.
Nonetheless, some measures have been identified to work in your favor.
The more common scenario is CSPs and even regulators focusing on the content of service-level agreements (SLAs). Firstly, CSPs have tried to expressly state the jurisdiction under which they fall, while regulators introduced standardization guidelines to the formulation of these SLAs.
Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) between countries also allow for easy transfer of sensitive data between them. One case we could look at is the MLAT between India and Poland. A CSP like Equinix can be forced to transfer data between these countries without issues around jurisdiction arising.
Apparently, only legal agreements can mitigate the risks surrounding cloud service jurisdictions.

The whole scenario around CSP jurisdiction is as complex as it gets. Conflict of law exists due to the geo-location of data centers and there are particularly suffocating rules on the control and transfer of data.
Nonetheless, there are solutions for online fintech owners that wish to adopt cloud infrastructure through CSPs. Your best bets are to choose a CSP that clearly states jurisdiction in its SLA, make sure this jurisdiction protects you against data breaches, and verify that MLATs exist between countries where your CSP’s data centers are located.

The Fintech company faced the challenge of a new web-based financial product. All the purchase, setup, and deployment needed to be completed within 8 weeks.
This financial product was an application system that managed the transfer of payments between businesses(B2B). Nutanix was selected after an encounter at VMWorld, as it served as a 3-tier solution that was easier to manage than company’s currently deployed server infrastructure.
Upon purchase, how did the Fintech company shape its web app framework for business continuity in case of a disaster?

14 Nutanix all-flash servers were purchased, half (7) were deployed at Fintech company’s Q9 company base to manage workloads, and the other half (7) were stationed on standby at a separate facility. This is the company’s second data center.
The Fintech company also used only its Nutanix systems to run mission-critical workloads. Its previously deployed traditional systems were used as business systems to manage payroll and accounting activities.

All this means is that the company’s disaster recovery framework assured it of continued core business operation even with the failure of primary financial management systems. Nutanix systems also brought about lower costs, reduced downtime, and simpler server management.
Overall, Fintech companies can learn a thing or two about formulating disaster recovery plans. All that is important is standby systems at separate locations and using backed-up systems to run core Fintech company workloads.

There are limitations to scalability when new users are introduced, as physical architectures are limited by storage space, bandwidth, and connection speed. To meet up, new physical servers are introduced to the system, and only the biggest and more financially capable companies are able to meet up with the costs.

This is where Avantone comes with its recommendations. Avantone addresses how cloud-computing technologies have helped with the challenges faced by the growing Fintech scene.

We use a case study centering around the deployment of an Fintech web application on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure, with servers managed using MySQL.  The MySQL database is hosted on a Load Balancer, which is a server that manages the number of Fintech servers to be active at a time based on the number of users it receives.

This load balancer also reads information about the user load of each game server in the infrastructure through the MySQL database. Each Fintech server has a limited number of users for optimal performance, so the load balancer identifies servers that have reached the maximum limit and directs a user to a server with fewer user load.

Servers with zero users are terminated to save power and costs, with only one kept running to accommodate new users in case existing servers reach their maximum load limit. Seamless user accommodation is guaranteed.

The SmartFoxServer technology is used to manage the authentication of users for security purposes.

Before these cloud computing technologies, only the big companies had enough infrastructure to scale and distribute user activities across multiple servers.  Now, cloud computing allows small operators to not only accommodate a large number of users but also leave the management of servers to the cloud service providers (the EC2 in this case).

For Fintech CEOs, this scalability means reduced costs for server deployment and maintenance, as you boycott previous limitations concerning infrastructure management and financial constraints. Cloud computing is the more feasible option to meet up with future industry growth trends.

This company has popular applications deployed on the web, tablet, and mobile platforms. Although it already had a large-scale server infrastructure that was fit to satisfy the needs of its applications, the difficulty in manually managing tens of thousands of public and private servers served as a blow to further scalability and a threat to its business continuity.

Vaco Technology was the go-to consultant for this job, and the company proposed that an enterprise solution be deployed to outsource the management of servers. Vaco proposed an IT infrastructure that successfully eased the interoperability and scalability of tens of thousands of servers. The results?
This client grew to manage over one million concurrent users and exponentially increased its productivity by 4×. According to them, Vaco provided a reliable solution that guaranteed fast scalability and consistency. The infrastructure was termed fit to accommodate millions of its users.

In this case study, we see a company maintaining business continuity through proper cloud service consultation and deployments. This is what you as a CEO should also focus on.
Improving your infrastructure scalability is important for any company expecting or wishing to grow alongside the finance industry. It is only by working with the right service providers that you achieve your goals and seamlessly avoid stunted business growth.

Acme Widget established a headquarter in North America in 2001, with the primary aim of operations being to provide financial, legal, tax planning, and treasury support to the Italian headquarter and for North American operations. 30 staff members were hired, office renovations began, and members were required to work from home.
This remote work environment created a problem relating to the secure access to emails and departmental files on the existing office server. The existing RAS server couldn’t accommodate 30 remote users. To fix this, a Windows 2000 VPN with 25 PPTP ports was set up at the office, and firewalls were deployed at each user’s home to assure security.
A GIAC professional was hired to run an assessment on the new VPN deployment and an issue was found with VPN termination points within the framework. Terminations behind the firewall and on the domain controller posed major threats to sensitive user account details, financial information, and server integrity.

A new VPN that was rid of these was the obvious solution and our GIAC professional identified one that additionally reduced costs by offering a managed server solution; Cisco VPN.
The new military-grade Cisco VPN implemented IPsec instead of PPTP ports and this allowed for improved activity transparency through accurate traffic logs. Computer-level authentication was also added to user-level authentication, ensuring greater security all-round.

The initiative of Acme Widget to hire the services of a GIAC professional saved it from massive losses that would have occurred through a vulnerable VPN deployment. This improvement in VPN was also achieved on a limited budget, over a short period, and covering large multinational locations.
The terms “multinational locations”, “financial information”, and “user authentication” point to how useful a secured VPN deployment is to Fintech companies.