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2022年06月29日

Fortinet Provides Major European Bank with Highly Scalable and Reliable SD-WAN Solution Across Sites

In modern banking, immediate visibility into balances and funds flows is crucial to great customer service. The days when checks meandered through the postal service, creating opaque periods of float for both parties to each payment, are largely in our rearview mirror. Instead, consumer and business account holders all want real-time insights into their available funds, the clearing status of specific transactions, and additional information such as payment messaging that supports automated reconciliation workflows. 

This demand for both immediacy and reliability is the reason why a financial institution with thousands of locations found itself in need of a new approach to network connectivity. The large European bank serves millions of customers across more than a dozen countries. Its headquarters campus, two data centers, and myriad bank branches and ATMs demand high-performance and dependable network connectivity to support employees’ and customers’ needs. 

Several years ago, the institution decided to accelerate network traffic by implementing a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solution from a well-known vendor. The bank’s global communications service provider began deployment, which went fine at first. However, scaling became a significant challenge for this organization as the network was unstable, undermining the bank’s network reliability goals. Only a year after the implementation began, the bank and its service provider began looking for an alternative SD-WAN solution.

Seeking Proof of SD-WAN Leadership

This time around, the bank and service provider were determined to make a better choice. Their primary requirement was stability at scale. In addition, they were looking for a solution that would optimize its use of available WAN links, including Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and LTE connections. The organizations also required visibility into traffic patterns so that the service provider could tweak SD-WAN settings to optimize performance of business-critical applications and ensure that key banking solutions always meet their service-level agreements (SLAs).

The institution and its service provider considered the leading SD-WAN vendors, including Fortinet. Each vendor that made the bank’s shortlist performed a proof of concept (POC). 

The local Fortinet team rapidly rolled out a large-scale POC of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to 500 sites. The service provider tested the solution’s performance, features, and stability at this scale. The results spoke for themselves: 

  • Fortinet Secure SD-WAN effectively load-balanced traffic between the two MPLS links and failed over to LTE.
  • The Fortinet solution enabled the service provider and bank to monitor performance of each link to track whether all connections were meeting SLA requirements.
  • The POC demonstrated that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, in a high-availability (HA) architecture, provides the stability that the bank requires of its WAN.

All in all, the service provider felt the proof of concept demonstrated that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN is the most mature solution on the market. 

Easily Managed and Reliable Secure SD-WAN at Scale

The bank’s service provider designed a Fortinet Secure SD-WAN network and began rolling out connections to the financial institution’s first 200 locations. Zero-touch provisioning within the FortiManager centralized management console enabled the service provider to establish connectivity and configure SD-WAN settings at all the bank’s many locations from a central site, dramatically reducing the length of time to deployment.

Now, every bank office or branch connects to the data centers via SD-WAN over dual MPLS links, with traffic load-balanced between the two connections. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN prioritizes business-critical applications between these active/active MPLS links. This application-aware routing of network traffic improves performance for those workloads, which translates into better visibility for, and responsiveness to, customers. 

In the event of an MPLS failure, traffic to and from every bank office and branch fails over to an LTE link in sub-second. Each ATM connects to the data centers in the same way as the branches and offices, but with a single MPLS connection with LTE backup. 

The service provider manages the WAN, including monitoring load-balancing optimization, using FortiManager and the FortiAnalyzer security analytics solution (together known as the Fortinet Fabric Management Center). Automation in the Fortinet Security Fabric and the single-pane-of-glass approach of the Fabric Management Center enable remote ongoing monitoring and management of the SD-WAN infrastructure. This greatly simplifies WAN management across the bank’s 3,000 locations and enhances the service provider’s understanding of network-wide security incidents. 

Deployment is ongoing, and the bank and its service provider are highly pleased with the results so far. The solution’s ease of deployment and management mean that all the bank’s 3,000 sites across over dozen countries and millions of customers will have real-time visibility into the account and transaction details they require, courtesy of the bank’s truly leading-edge WAN.

Source:
https://www.fortinet.com/blog/customer-stories/fortinet-provides-major-european-bank-highly-scalable-reliable-sdwan-solution-across-sites?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fortinet%2Fblogs+%28Fortinet+All+Blogs%29