Geert Degezelle has 20 years’ experience in IT and telecoms, utilizing his passion for ICT by taking advantage of trends and innovations to ensure business success. By embracing new technological developments, such as the hybrid cloud and software defined anything, Geert has ensured that Telindus has truly become a trusted partner, helping its customers shift their focus from technology to innovation and turning ICT into a business enabler.

With vast amounts of mission-critical data being moved around global networks and into the cloud, coupled with the need to comply with new and changing regulations, organizations all over the world are adjusting their security strategies. However, an organization’s ability to protect itself from a breach, cybercrime and / or reputation damage does not stop with perimeter detection and defenses - a robust security strategy must include in-flight data encryption – and it needs to be simple to deploy and manage.

With this in mind, and following my last blog a few weeks ago, when Telindus was accredited as the first organisation worldwide to achieve Ciena’s Advanced Technical Support Status (ATSS), Telindus is now also the first European partner to deploy Ciena’s new WaveLogic Encryption solution for one of our finance customers in the Netherlands!

200G encryption for compliance and low latency

Even before it was officially announced, Telindus was hard at work implementing the new 200G WaveLogic Encryption solution in the Dutch financial services sector, where privacy, regulations and legislations play a major role and non-compliance is not an option. With the European Parliament reaching an agreement in principle on new privacy regulations, and the Dutch Data Breach Notification Law that went  into effect  from January 1^st 2016 – with the obligation to report any breaches not only to the authorities, but to all involved – security concerns have never been higher on the agenda.

In the sensitive finance sector, we work with our customers to deploy a holistic protection strategy right from the outset, instilling security by design. By encrypting from Layer 1 - at the optical layer – financial organisations can ensure safeguards across the entire network and all required protocols without bandwidth constraints. With Ciena’s new WaveLogic Encryption solution, encrypted traffic up to 17.6Tbs can be carried over a single dark fibre pair with less than a thousandth of the latency of a Layer 3 encryption solution.

In addition, as financial institutions are required to have geographic redundancy, with at least 60 km between data centres, the new 200G WaveLogic Encryption solution not only ensures privacy and prevents reputational damage, it also provides the most efficient, low-latency service; ensuring even synchronous business continuity and disaster recovery (BC / DC) will work when encrypted over these distances.  Ciena’s transparent solution enables encryption of all traffic types and protocols running between data centres. It offers a single transport and security solution for network and storage traffic.

High-bandwidth security

Until recently, the financial sector considered networks purely as a necessary expense for connectivity.  However, with the growing emphasis on delivering enhanced services to customers with technologies such as cloud computing, mobile apps, big data & analytics, as well as needing to ensure the highest levels of compliance with security requirements and data protection regulations, the network is now recognized as a critical foundation on which all these technologies depend. 

A next generation network maximizes the cost-effectiveness and reliability of these technologies and delivers the automation and high-availability needed. Critically, an advanced network also ensures an organization can cope with the tremendous growth in bandwidth requirements, stringent SLA requirements for trading, BC/DR and data centre interconnections (DCI).  Modern networks, leveraging packet-optical technology, also remove the need for separate lines for each additional connection, significantly reducing complexity and costs; so multiple 100 GbE connections can be transmitted in parallel on a single fibre pair.

As a result, institutions can buy connectivity services ‘on-demand’ instead of paying for anticipated requirements, or, even worse, having too little or accepting lower performance and higher latency. These specialist networking technologies also give financial institutions an architecture that is flexible and responsive, able to respond to rapid organisational and industry changes. Being able to fully integrate line-rate, low latency, multi-protocol encryption helps all of this meet the regulatory requirements for security and data protection compliance.

At Telindus we are extremely proud that Ciena has confirmed our know-how as an ATSS partner, and are looking forward to helping our customers optimize their information security and business resilience with Ciena’s new high performance, FIPs-certified, Assured Networking solutions.