First Bank gains 35% higher application performance and saves $1 million annually with the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform

To meet high customer expectations, St. Louis-based First Bank has fully embraced digitalization, building a hybrid cloud IT infrastructure to run everything from its core banking platform and voice system to mortgage applications and productivity solutions like Microsoft Office 365. Naturally, the bank’s wide-area network (WAN) plays a pivotal role in connecting users to these critical applications.

As First Bank grew, the amount of data traversing the WAN outpaced available bandwidth and dragged down performance. Marc Ashworth, First Bank’s Chief Information Security Officer, explains, “We had a pretty traditional MPLS network with mostly T1 lines. Trying to push through a couple hundred megabytes of data just drowned our circuits.”

EdgeConnect Passes the Quality and Reliability Test

First Bank evaluated SD-WAN as a potential solution to the bandwidth problem but none of the vendors could meet a key requirement: failing over circuits without dropping a voice call. So, Ashworth consulted local IT service provider,安全数据, who told him about Silver Peak (acquired by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company).

After thoroughly testing the阿鲁巴EdgeConnectSD-WAN edge platform, Ashworth concluded, “EdgeConnect was the first product we came across that truly did what it was supposed to do. We had our voice system running across two circuits, unplugged one, and we didn’t drop the call.”

网络灵活性和一致的安全性

Following the successful test, Ashworth and his team deployed EdgeConnect appliances across all of the bank’s 105 branches, dozens of ATM locations, several home offices, and even in the data center of its cloud-based voice provider. Most sites are linked by bonded DSL and broadband circuits, or a pair of broadband circuits with LTE for backup—MPLS is completely gone.

EdgeConnect平台还使第一银行能够退休其传统的分支路由器，并利用内置的基于州区域的防火墙使自适应突破使可信赖的SaaS和云应用程序以及在分支机构提供安全的Wi-Fi访问权限。Ashworth指出：“每个分支机构的本地突破都提高了整体申请表现，并为我们的员工提供了更好的经验。”

Ashworth also foresees extending the SD-WAN with a secure access service edge (SASE) to ensure consistent security for the bank’s growing number of remote staff. “With remote users being such a big component of our environment today, leveraging SASE with the EdgeConnect platform will provide a faster, more efficient way for them to securely access assets across our network and in the cloud.”

Accelerates opening new branch locations

Ashworth指出：“当我们推出EdgeConnect设备时，我们在分支机构合并了很多旧的基础架构。但是，当涉及到EdgeConnect部署本身时，每个站点只需大约15分钟。我们只是将其插入，集中应用业务意图覆盖，我们完成了。”

Ashworth adds that the ease of deploying EdgeConnect will help First Bank accelerate branch openings as it continues to expand. “It depends on the availability of circuits, but typically our lead time for bringing a new branch online has gone from about 90 days to a couple weeks since having the SD-WAN.”

Boosts Application Performance and Network Uptime

The EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform has brought a whole new level of application performance and network uptime to First Bank. Available bandwidth has soared from 3 Mbps to as much as 200 Mbps at many sites. Ashworth quips that for First Bank employees “it’s so much bandwidth they don’t know what to do with it all.”

Greater bandwidth alone has increased application performance dramatically. In addition, First Bank implemented optionalAruba BoostWAN optimization to accelerate performance for things like HTTP traffic, file sharing, and branch backups.

Ashworth报道,特别是用于备份,Boost is achieving up to 98 percent compression, and for other applications 70–80 percent compression. This translates to 35 percent higher application performance on average.

Assured WAN uptime helps serve customers better

阿什沃思（Ashworth）建议，Aruba SD-WAN解决方案的最大好处之一得到了改善的WAN可用性，尤其是对于基本电路质量不是很可靠的分支机构。

他说：“我们有一些分支机构失去了他们的主要巡回赛，并且仍然继续运行，因为他们失败了LTE备份。”“分支机构中的人们甚至都不知道有问题。保持正常运行时间对于我们的员工做工作并以最佳的体验质量为客户服务至关重要。”

Powerful ROI With Savings in Time and Money

Consolidating on EdgeConnect has greatly simplified the WAN edge, saving time and money. Ashworth points out that from an administration standpoint, IT saves a lot of time because there’s no need to worry about additional configurations, updates, or maintenance of separate branch routers and firewalls. Moreover, by centrally managing the SD-WAN with the阿鲁巴编排management console, everything from new deployments to firmware updates and network monitoring is easier.

“Overall monitoring and administration is so much easier now than with a traditional router-centric model,” Ashworth remarks. “The insights we get through Orchestrator have been really valuable for troubleshooting system or voice issues. It’s definitely freed up time for my team to focus on optimizing each branch instead of maintaining equipment.”

With less edge equipment to own and upgrade, combined with a revamped voice system, Ashworth estimates a 30–40 percent return on investment over five years. Even more dramatic, he notes, “We’ll be saving over $1 million per year compared to our previous MPLS network.”

从EdgeConnect建立持续价值

Ashworth is continually exploring additional ways to benefit from EdgeConnect. For example, using physical and virtual EdgeConnect appliances, he and his team enabled certain branches to act as regional data center hubs to reduce application traffic heading to SaaS and cloud applications, as well as easing backup traffic being backhauled to the primary data center.

这些新功能极大地改善了银行的灾难恢复（DR）测试。阿什沃思（Ashworth）和他的团队只需使用自适应突破来基于地理位置将分支指向最近的数据中心。Ashworth指出：“由于我们现在可以同时在两个数据中心运行多少个应用程序，我们将DR测试时间减少了约70％。”“这是可以通过将站点连接到最低延迟的数据中心，然后在需要时失败到其他数据中心。”

Ashworth concludes, “The EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform is enabling us to do many things that simply weren’t possible before. The ability to have a physical EdgeConnect appliance on prem or virtual in the cloud give us flexibility to expand the network very efficiently.”