We have received authorization as a carrier for the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN). This is an important milestone for us and, at the same time, confirmation that our infrastructure meets the high standards of the Swiss financial center.
With this authorization, we can now connect financial institutions directly to the SSFN and offer them a secure, stable, and highly available communications infrastructure.
What is the SSFN?
The Secure Swiss Finance Network is a joint initiative of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and SIX. It enables authorized participants in the Swiss financial center to communicate securely with one another and with key financial market infrastructures.
Swiss Interbank Clearing (SIC) plays a central role in this. An average of approximately 200 billion Swiss francs and 2.6 million transactions are processed daily through this system. The requirements for security, stability, and availability of the underlying infrastructure are correspondingly high.
SCION as the Foundation for Secure Networking
The SSFN is based on SCION network technology. It combines the security of private networks with the flexibility of modern IP-based communication.
SCION enables controllable network paths and creates a robust infrastructure that can be operated across multiple providers. This reduces dependencies and increases resilience.
This is precisely where our own infrastructure comes into play. We have implemented four-fold geographic redundancy for our SCION core—the heart of our backbone. The infrastructure is distributed across several geographically separate locations. This creates additional redundancy and ensures that communication can continue reliably even if individual components or locations fail.
This architecture is a significant advantage, particularly for banks and financial institutions, where high availability is crucial.
An important step for us
With our certification as an SSFN carrier, we are expanding our offerings for the Swiss financial center. We can support financial institutions in connecting to the SSFN and provide them with the necessary connectivity from a highly available infrastructure.
This authorization confirms our many years of experience in building and operating secure communication networks. At the same time, it demonstrates that we can meet high standards of security, availability, and stability even for business-critical applications.
What does this mean for our customers and partners?
With its certification as an SSFN carrier, GAS&COM is expanding its connectivity portfolio to include a secure and highly resilient network solution for banks and financial institutions with heightened security and availability requirements.
Our customers now have the ability to securely access the Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) via SCION, thereby establishing a protected connection to the Swiss financial center. Communication takes place via an infrastructure specifically designed to meet high security and availability requirements, rather than over the public Internet.
In this way, GAS&COM offers its customers a reliable foundation for secure connectivity to business-critical services while simultaneously strengthening their cyber resilience.
