Role of Network Attached Storage in Fintech

Fintech is the go-to term for “Financial Technology”. The term refers to technology, hardware and software associated with financial services. Examples of Fintech include technology used by banks, servers used by financial service providers, storage solutions utilized by insurance service providers etc. Fintech is a vast field that generates and has to deal with big data. Big data presents various challenges like data handling, data management, computation, data analytics, data storage, backup and disaster recovery.

The utilization of Fintech has helped optimize financial services and with advances in Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the financial industry is also experiencing automation. A combination of IoT (Internet of Things), AI and the conventional software associated with the finance industry generates extraordinary data storage requirements. Network Attached Storage (NAS) plays a pivotal role to effectively store and handle this data.

The integral role of NAS appliances in Fintech

When we talk about Fintech data, we’re referring to loads of transactional data, PII (Personally Identifiable Information), and other sensitive data that needs a secure storage solution. As financial services mostly rely on an array of departments to effectively deliver their services, it is important that this data is readily available and accessible across a network. Other than accessibility, the other major requirement of this data is scalability.

To simplify things, we can summarize Fintech big data requirements as follows:

1. Scalability.

2. Accessibility.

3. Security.

4. Reduced Latency.

5. High IOPS support.

6. Cost effectiveness.

The list is a lot longer than this but these are the general requirements of almost every Fintech powered enterprise.

These requirements are the features that NAS appliances offer. The appliance can scale-up which means additional disk drives can be added to a node to add storage capacity. However, this compromises performance. There are some vendors that provide scale-out NAS. In this case, the appliance scales horizontally with the addition of nodes. This not only increases storage capacity but also performance. And there are no limitations on how much the storage capacity can be scaled out to.

In terms of accessibility, the appliance shares the stored data over the network. Within a network, the data is available to all resources with the right permissions. The data is readily accessible and the latency of the appliance is less than the latency of cloud based storage. As the device is available via the local network, it facilitates faster access to data.

The data stored within NAS storage appliances is secured using AES-256 bit encryption. If the appliance comes with cloud connect services then the data is secured using SSL (Secure Socket Layer). This makes the entire system secure and reliable. For high IOPS support, this depends mostly on the vendor. For instance, StoneFly’s scale out NAS appliances are capable of efficiently address high IOPS requirements.

The same goes for cost effectiveness of an appliance: it depends on the vendor. As StoneFly’s NAS appliances use flash memory, they are cost effective and provide more throughputs as compared to conventional storage.

Conclusion

Fintech is evolving and continuously growing, introducing automation and efficiency in the finance industry. However, to do so Fintech relies on big data. The efficient storage and handling of this data empowers Fintech and in turn the enterprise. NAS appliances fulfill this role by addressing the storage requirements of this big data.