A network you can bank on’?

This global bank offers a wide range of financial services that includes retail and corporate banking as well as asset management, stock trading and treasury services. Operating in 20 countries worldwide, optimizing its network for zero downtime and low latency is a business critical endeavor. But this was proving to be a time-consuming and complex challenge for the bank’s central IT team.

Working with multiple local, national, and regional suppliers – 7 different vendors in total, all providing services with different characteristics, standards and capabilities – meant it was no easy task to maintain the highest levels of performance and management required across the IT ecosystem. 

To transform its operations, the bank turned to Arelion for a streamlined global solution that would deliver the bandwidth, connectivity, and predictability it needed – along with the freedom to control and route traffic in accordance to its own.

With multiple data centers (DCs) and a cloud production environment, bullet-proof connectivity and low-latency traffic forwarding is a must-have for the bank’s mission critical services. Quite simply, all systems and applications need to operate in harmony, with minimal risk and seamless processing.

By connecting the bank’s headquarters, data centers and disaster recovery sites in all markets, Arelion's high-capacity backbone core solution delivers all the necessary L2/L3 protocol transparency requirements the bank needs to manage protocols such as CDP, Mac-Sec and support MTU jumbo frames. This approach enables the bank to create and control its own routing principles across Arelion's protected MPLS backbone.

Delivering the strict separation of gographically diverse networks required to assure the high reliability and availability the bank needs, the solution incorporates Arelion’s 40G-enabled Ethernet services with seamless end-to-end SLA performance and monitoring, primary and backup EVPLs, with diverse fixed path routing and dynamic automatic rerouting, if required - ensuring always-on connectivity.

Globally, Arelion provides the bank with high-capacity Ethernet EVPL links that connect its international sites with a point-to-multipoint topology, effectively linking redundant core sites with the main data centers and disaster recovery sites -from the home market to each operating country. 

Multiple Services over One Port (MSOP) functionality delivers inherent scalability for additional services on the existing, diverse infrastructure to further increase the cost-efficiency of the solution.

This foundation of diverse connectivity has evolved over time to incorporate dedicated Arelion AS1299 IP connections with geo-localized local IP rental subnets, used primarily for Microsoft Office 365. This provides the bank with the controlled, scalable, and flexible private network connectivity it needs for its office traffic.

A single, streamlined global connectivity solution now ensures that the bank’s operations in all geographical regions enjoy unfettered access to reliable services. This is underpinned by a unified and well-integrated architecture that is designed for synchronizing, routing, and transacting in real-time.

Working with a single partner that acts as a one-stop shop for global connectivity, delivered via a single co-terminus agreement with standardized SLAs has resulted in smoother global operations and greater efficiency for the bank.

With the ability to assess the latency sensitivities of all applications running across its global business, the bank is now free to route traffic on its own terms across the Arelion backbone. By utilizing carefully defined protocols which minimize variables and eliminate delays, the bank can now rely on the low-latency connectivity needed to support its services, systems, and applications around the world.

Providing expert assistance and support to help guide, enable and mitigate business risk, Arelion has become the bank’s trusted advisor on all things related to global connectivity.