Finance IPNet to Be Decommissioned in September 2024

At the end of September 2024, SIX will decommission Finance IPNet as the gateway to its infrastructure services. Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) has proven successful as a communication service and will replace Finance IPNet as a gateway. Nothing will change for customers with other gateways to SIX (such as their own fiber optic cables).

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Secure access to infrastructure services is essential for a smoothly functioning Swiss financial center. Data exchange among participants has to meet the very highest requirements regarding security and availability. Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN), introduced in 2021, does this in every respect.

SSFN is based on modern SCION technology and enables secure, uninterrupted communication in a closed group of participants. Independent of the internet, SSFN protects its users from cyber risks when exchanging data and increases the resilience of the individual participants in particular and the Swiss financial system in general. SSFN offers material advantages over Finance IPNet, which has been in use for around 20 years. For example, the latter communication network only allows data to be exchanged between SIX and its customers but not between customers themselves. In the event of redundant connections, the outage of just one can temporarily interrupt the session, which would not be the case with SSFN.

SSFN has already been used for the exchange of production data for some time, e.g. by SIC, euroSIC and SECOM. All infrastructure services of SIX that currently use Finance IPNet as a gateway have been in principle prepared for the connection via SSFN.

SIX will inform its customers at the beginning of 2023 about the pending retirement of Finance IPNet in September 2024 at the level of infrastructure services. Customers of SIX with a Finance IPNet connection that have not yet taken action to connect to SSFN are encouraged to initiate the switch to SSFN.

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