With artificial intelligence on the rise, financial institutions are looking to heterogeneous networks to bolster their efforts in agile application integration.
Rapid artificial intelligence (AI) growth among enterprises is driving the next phase of digital transformation, with the technology presenting unprecedented business opportunities. This enthusiasm has seen applications grow tenfold due to AI-powered cloud migration, with over 80 percent of services now on the cloud.
Eager to reap the tremendous value of AI while responding quickly to market changes, organisations are combining different business functions across different systems through agile application integration. This approach, however, places immense pressure on their networks, as companies will require high network resilience and operational efficiency.
This is further compounded in the financial sector, where the rapid pace means even a second’s delay can result in missed opportunities and financial losses.
Addressing network concerns with heterogeneous networks
As high network performance is necessary for meeting the demands of real-time transactions, online banking, and data analytics, heterogeneous networks have emerged as a viable solution to address reliability issues without sacrificing latency by incorporating devices and solutions across multiple vendors to ensure seamless connectivity.
This offers financial institutions improved coverage and capacity compared to traditional networks, allowing them to incorporate devices and solutions from their preferred vendors and eliminating vendor lock-in. At the same time, this can ensure optimal network performance despite congested bandwidth.
That said, many institutions come across significant challenges. A major concern is interconnectivity. Most vendors have distinct network protocols that can result in poor interoperability. Companies also experienced rising operational costs when managing multiple vendors, as advanced network management tools and expertise are usually necessary to ensure network visibility.
Such tools become especially vital when identifying which service or device is not working to its fullest capacity. Ensuring these technologies work seamlessly across service providers can also be time-consuming, with expenses bolstered by initial setup costs.
Delivering a centralized overview across multi-vendor networks
Overcoming these challenges requires a solution that can not only offer virtual network provisioning across a multi-vendor architecture but also address the myriad challenges of integration, security, and management for heterogeneous networks.
To this end, Huawei has designed the Xinghe Intelligent Ultra-Resilient Financial Data Centre Network to ease the deployment of such networks. Recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Switching, Huawei has achieved the highest score in the “Completeness of Vision” category. Its breadth of experience in connectivity solutions means that companies no longer have to limit themselves to a single network vendor or tackle the complexity of managing a multi-vendor environment.
As an AI-powered connectivity delivering a central, unified view to manage multi-vendor networks, the Xinghe Intelligent Ultra-Resilient Financial Data Centre Network allows services and devices to operate as a single cohesive system, not unlike a conductor orchestrating multiple instruments to produce a harmonious, melodic symphony.
The solution is built upon the Huawei CloudEngine series of data center switches, which delivers high-performance connectivity, as well as the Huawei iMaster NCE, a network cloud engine serving as the network’s neural center. Together, Xinghe offers reliable and secure network performance, as well as smart operations and management (O&M) capabilities.
- Steady deployment: Xinghe drives effective, error-free provisioning with the iMaster NCE network digital map. This provides users with a network application analysis that offers visibility into the network, such that security policies can be analyzed and deployed within minutes. At the same time, the most suitable firewall configurations are automatically recommended, with heterogeneous firewall setups implemented within five minutes. Xinghe can also integrate various IT services management (ITSM) tools, so as to streamline and deliver end-to-end IT services.
- Stable reliability: With failover happening within milliseconds in the event of network disruptions, Xinghe ensures zero service interruptions with CloudEngine switches, bolstered by intelligent lossless network technology and multi-layered reliability functions.
- Smart O&M: Xinghe is equipped with Huawei NetMaster, a large network model, to learn from businesses’ network fault-handling experiences, so the solution can automatically resolve faults alongside AI agents. This reduces network mean time to repair (MTTR) to less than five minutes. The solution can also tackle network faults with “1-3-5” troubleshooting of intra-data centre faults, as well as precise, minute-level demarcation of faults across data centres.
Find out more about how Xinghe can help you bolster your financial institution’s network performance and intelligent digital transformation efforts with AI.
