How to Increase Financial Network Lab Efficiency

+ Velocity Core

Improve Financial Network Lab Efficiency

Financial enterprises must test increasingly complex networks faster while meeting regulatory requirements for timely compliance, consumer duty, data integrity, and security assurance, many of which recur several times per year. Test teams validate new features, releases, and infrastructure changes and must confirm that SLAs hold under real-world loads. In a typical environment, labs are segregated by technology or vendor and spread across customer premises and vendor facilities. Lab setup can take weeks and require multiple technicians. Some labs remain static to avoid setup effort, which limits flexibility. Test runs take several months with manually generated reports, and building test plans and executing tests for a new feature commonly takes nine to 12 months.

Silos create additional risk. Without cross-environment integration testing, issues never tested in the lab surface in production. Impairment testing is minimal and absent from integrated environments, leaving resiliency and recovery unverified. Multiple tools and processes duplicate effort, and vendors paid for best-effort testing pools add cost without guaranteed coverage. Teams compete for shared equipment, creating queue delays and idle periods. Engineers need a virtual lab for each team that can be reserved and rebuilt on demand from reusable topology templates, automated regression suites converted from manual test cases, integration and impairment testing across environments, and centralized reporting that tracks progress against the test plan.

Financial Network Lab Efficiency Solution

Keysight lab modernization solutions for financial enterprises abstracts physical, virtual, and hybrid lab resources into a virtual lab for each test team. Through Keysight Velocity Core, teams reserve resources for a designated timeslot, build templates for required topologies, and trigger fully automated topology builds, including transparent L1/L2 connectivity across the switching fabric. Velocity iTest provides a centralized environment to capture, develop, and automate test cases, with results feeding a reporting engine that tracks progress against the plan. The platform integrates with in-house and third-party automation tools and CI/CD pipelines. Keysight services cover lab inventory, physical design, network integration, and conversion of manual tests. Automation supports cross-environment integration and impairment testing and powers down idle equipment. In one case study, average test duration improved 40% and time to market improved 40% to 80%.

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