Goldman Sachs uses Forward Enterprise to model entire 15,000+ device network

World-class financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs are always evolving. They and other modern multinational banks are focused on innovation and digital transformation to ensure that the billions of transactions every day are secure and predictable. Digitization and the adoption of emerging technologies allow banks to operate more efficiently but also bring new and unique challenges to their network architects and operators. Beyond the challenges that come with implementing new technology, government regulations dictate strict policy compliance. Oversight agencies perform routine and outage-related checks that raise the requirements and manpower needed to manage their network.

Goldman Sachs employs highly sophisticated technologists to stay on the cutting edge of digital transformation. With the goal of reducing the occurrence of high-severity incidents, they worked for years internally developing tools to effectively map, verify, and automate their network operations. Ultimately, maintaining and scaling some of these tools was better left to outside expertise. While the network team was skeptical at first, Forward Enterprise seemed to solve the challenges they were facing: comprehensive path search, visualization/diagramming, and network readiness for application roll-outs. After a proof of concept period, the Forward platform not only proved to be fully scalable to all 15K+ network devices, but the Forward product and engineering experts showed the ability to quickly move feature requests into product updates.

Today the network team at Goldman Sachs relies daily on Forward Enterprise to perform end-to-end path analysis, proactively ensuring that network behavior is aligned with stated policies and intent. They have significantly improved operational efficiency, and successfully reduced change-related incidents.