In 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby coined the phrase “data is the new oil” to emphasize the importance of it as the primary resource that would drive economic markets. The catchphrase also implies that data, like oil, needs refining and processing to become useful.
While Humby’s proclamation has been prophetic and durable it misses the significance of the logistics involved in transporting data – akin to moving oil from wellheads to refineries using barges, tankers, overland, pipelines, trucks, and railroads.
For industries where data is an epicenter, wavelength services offer the supply chain that protects its value. Wavelength services comprise a special form of fiber optic connectivity where a pair of fibers transmits multiple services across different channels of light or spectrum. The technology is predicated on dividing light into different Wavelengths with each carrying a unique stream of data. These Wavelengths of lit fiber are either leased or allocated specifically to transmit data between locations.
Consider that each separate Wavelength is essentially a private line; depending on your needs it’s possible to have anywhere from one to dozens of different Wavelengths on a pair of fibers. Wavelength services are especially useful for high bandwidth applications like data center interconnects and for use by financial institutions like large regional banks, which require data that can be secured, quickly transmitted, and efficiently replicated and processed.
The popularity of this technology is evidenced by a recent report, indicating that the global market for Wavelength services will experience significant growth (11.8% CAGR) up until 2030.
Complex Challenges of Large Data Sets
For financial institutions, there’s an inherent risk to relying on the traditional Internet for managing data. Doing so leaves them susceptible to network events and subsequent outages that are often unforeseen by the teams managing data transmission. Conversely, companies employing a Wavelength can be assured that the bandwidth is all theirs. Wavelengths also offer financial service organizations a precise geographical path that the network takes – whether it’s to a third-party data center or its own data center(s).
Beyond security considerations and the size of the data sets being managed by these teams is the complexity of the data, which can include transaction records, customer information, market data, and more. Adding to volume and complexity is the importance of maintaining data quality. Transmitting these large data batches can cause issues such as incomplete, inconsistent, or inaccurate data. Ensuring data quality requires robust data governance processes and the use of advanced data cleansing and validation techniques.
Regulatory oversight looms large for every financial institution that must meet exacting requirements regarding data management, reporting, and compliance. Managing large data sets while ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and various financial regulations adds a layer of complexity that Wavelength services can help mitigate.
Updating large data sets across brick-and-mortar locations poses additional challenges for financial institutions. Chief among these is maintaining consistency across multiple, physical locales, especially when updates need to be synchronized in real-time. Physical locations employing different IT infrastructures can complicate the compatibility needed when updating large data sets. In the same vein, locations having varying levels of network connectivity, such as limited bandwidth or unreliable connections, can lead to transfers being slow and prone to interruptions.
Transmitting large amounts of data can require significant resources, including bandwidth, storage capacity, and computing power. Allocating these resources effectively across multiple (brick and mortar) sites while balancing competing priorities and minimizing costs can be a challenge for financial institutions.
Wavelengths: Financial Industry’s Companion for Security, Speed, Replication and Processing
When it comes to security, speed, data replication, and processing, Wavelength services seem tailor-made for financial institutions.
Because Wavelength services operate over dedicated channels, they provide a secure, segmented, and high-capacity solution for data transmission. This allows financial institutions to transmit their data securely and efficiently, reducing the risk of interception or tampering.
With an ability to transmit multiple terabits of data per second, Wavelengths keep pace with the speed of business. As such they provide financial institutions with the ability to efficiently move large volumes of data between locations, facilitating real-time transactions, data replication, and processing.
For the financial services industry, disaster recovery isn’t a nice to have, it’s a requirement for business continuity and regulatory compliance. Wavelength services provide a high-speed, low-latency connection between data centers, which can support backup and data replication.
Financial institutions – especially large ones – require high-performance computing and processing capabilities for everything from analyzing data for risk management to fraud detection, algorithmic trading, and more. For these tasks, Wavelength services are instrumental in connecting data centers to high-performance computing clusters and processing resources, which support faster data processing and analysis.
Wavelength Services from FiberLight
FiberLight delivers business-class Wavelength services over FiberLight’s regional fiber optic networks serving Texas, the Northern VA area, the Atlanta metro, and Central Florida. These dedicated solutions are particularly ideal for customers managing large data transfers between data centers and intricate IT applications. For these organizations, FiberLight’s private fiber connections ensure swift, reliable, and secure data transport.
FiberLight’s Wavelength services operate at varying speeds (10G, 100G, and 400Gbps) across our dense fiber network that’s been built specifically for business. To learn more about FiberLight’s services visit our Wavelength solutions page where you can download our product brief.
