As a global center for finance and commerce, protecting and moving critical information is vital for New York City businesses, especially within the Wall Street financial sector. Today, financial market data is collected and consolidated in real-time from trading venues around the world and distributed to brokers and dealers; transaction data is backed-up and stored off-site where it can quickly be retrieved in case of a disaster; and online banking solutions enable retail banks to establish an essential physical presence in an increasingly virtual world. Security, confidentiality, and accuracy are of the utmost importance in transporting this data.

For years, the financial sector, like so many other industries, has relied upon private-line, frame relay or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network connections to move data around. However, as the industry is forced by new regulations to better control the delivery and use of financial data, companies are increasingly looking to rely more heavily on faster, more flexible and more reliable networks to securely deliver their many applications and services to customers, employees, and other users.

For example, financial institutions require more data throughput to aggregate bandwidth from the institution to the Federal Reserve in compliance with the newly assigned Check 21. Banks are seeking ways to give customers improved service while making better use of branch office facilities. And financial institutions, with their large, secure data backup and file sharing requirements need higher-speed networks more than ever before.

As a result, the reliability and familiarity of Ethernet is rapidly gaining traction in the wide-area network (WAN). Metro Ethernet, a self-healing, IP based protocol, provides true fail-over connectivity. Metro Ethernet easily satisfies the stringent service level agreements and high speeds demanded by the financial services industry's business continuance and disaster recovery requirements. Furthermore, IT executives are already used to dealing with Ethernet in their LANs, since more than 98 percent of all data traffic begins and terminates on Ethernet ports.

Besides complying with the financial industry's rigorous network uptime and management requirements, fiber-based Metro Ethernet - whether used in a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint network topology - is simply a 30-50 percent less expensive way to move data around than previous WAN solutions. It also lets financial services scale up bandwidth and grow the network capacity as needed, without having to rip out and replace an entire network to gain additional capacity.

In addition, there is an emerging ability for network administrators to slice the tremendous amounts of bandwidth delivered by Metro Ethernet on an application-specific basis by utilizing Virtual LANs (VLANs) to segment traffic running over the WAN connection. As a result, guaranteed throughput can be delivered to departments within a financial organization based on their unique needs.

Information rarely needs to move as quickly as in the financial markets. Since Metro Ethernet combines capacity with simplicity and flexibility, it is rapidly becoming an ideal communications platform for the financial services industry.

Kevin Curran is the senior vice president of marketing and product management for Optimum Lightpath (www.optimumlightpath.com), the next-generation business broadband service provider division of Cablevision Systems Corporation. He may be reached at 516-803-1236 or via email at ktcurran@cablevision.com.