InterBank helps employees serve customers more responsively with SD-WAN built on Aruba EdgeConnect
Customer Profile
InterBank operates more than 40 locations in Texas and Oklahoma and has assets of more than $3.5 billion. The bank strives to provide outstanding service to meet the needs of its customers and contribute to the economic strength of the communities it serves.- Vertical: Financial services
- Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
- Customer size: Approximately 400 employees across 40-plus U.S. locations
Use Case
Improve quality of experience for remote locations accessing central applications to elevate employee productivity and responsiveness in serving bank customers.
Requirements
- Mitigate network downtime in 40-plus remote, rural branches
- Efficiently, securely connect to critical applications in central data centers
- Improve operational efficiency to deliver higher-quality services to customers
Outcomes
- Boosts employee productivity and quality of experience in remote locations with higher voice quality and application performance
- Consolidates the WAN edge infrastructure, retiring legacy routers and firewalls
- Assures robust security at the WAN edge with segmented trust zones
As a highly successful commercial lending bank, InterBank looks for solid investments that return value for customers and the communities it serves. So, when slow applications and inconsistent voice quality on its legacy WAN threatened to diminish productivity and customer services, InterBank decided to invest in a new WAN solution.
Daniel Ruhl, senior vice president and director of IT for InterBank, explains, "We had a very traditional MPLS network with Cisco routers and firewalls at each branch. With any circuit outage, it would disconnect applications temporarily and disrupt whatever people were working on. And we had issues with quality of service."
Improving Quality of Experience for Remote Sites
InterBank operates across Texas and Oklahoma, including several remote rural locations that struggled to connect reliably to critical applications like core banking. On the MPLS network, loading content from a remote terminal could take five or more seconds, frustrating employees and customers alike.
Ruhl saw SD-WAN as the best solution for connecting the bank's 40-plus branches with its two central data centers. But he wanted to be sure of making the right investment.
In choosing an SD-WAN vendor, Ruhl underscores a key objective: "We want to be really smart with the money we spend. If we're going to spend the company's money on technology, we want that technology to help us be more efficient in delivering high quality services to InterBank's customers and employees."
Making a Smart Investment in SD-WAN
Ruhl says he puts a lot of trust in Gartner research, specifically its annual Magic Quadrant reports. "The fact that Aruba consistently comes in at the top of Gartner's Magic Quadrant convinced me to reach out to my partner and set up a demo."
In fact, Ruhl quickly contacted partner CDW to get a close, hands-on look at the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform, a self-driving SD-WAN by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. He appreciated how EdgeConnect provides a complete suite of SD-WAN capabilities on a single unified platform.
"EdgeConnect is so simple, you don't need a specialized network engineer," Ruhl says.
Deep network visibility helps stay ahead of issues
Ruhl also valued the template-driven deployment and management approach offered in the Aruba Orchestrator management console, which factored heavily in his final decision.
"What I really like is the reporting in Orchestrator," Rule says. "We can watch our bandwidth utilization, our voice quality. We can drill down and see exactly what's going on with the physical circuit and take that to the operator if we're having issues. That deep visibility helps us stay ahead of network issues before users notice."
Consolidates the WAN Edge on a Unified Platform
After a very thorough evaluation period, Ruhl and his team rolled out SD-WAN across the bank's branches and data centers. Each EdgeConnect appliance connects to one MPLS circuit and one broadband link, bonded to enable both underlay services to be used simultaneously.
With EdgeConnect, InterBank also has been able to consolidate its edge infrastructure, retiring its legacy Cisco routers and firewalls and instead using the routing interoperability and stateful zone-based firewall within EdgeConnect.
"All routing and edge security is now handled by EdgeConnect," Ruhl notes. "We micro-segment our network with a lot of trust zones between different VLANS. We've been able to map all our Cisco access lists into the zones in EdgeConnect using Orchestrator. Untrusted things like alarm panels and ATM machines are in their own zones on EdgeConnect. Doing all this in Orchestrator is very simple."
Dramatic Improvement in Quality and Performance
Using the centralized Orchestrator management console, Ruhl configured business intent overlays that guarantee the appropriate network resources for different application classes based on their business priority. For example, voice traffic is the highest priority, and is classified as real time, while core banking and the teller system are classified as critical.
Leveraging advanced SD-WAN capabilities provided by EdgeConnect, like path conditioning, quality of service, and dynamic path control, combined with the business intent overlays, have led to much higher quality of experience for end users, and employees are able to be more productive instead of frustrated.
Ruhl says, "Since deploying the Aruba SD-WAN, we've seen a dramatic improvement in voice quality. Employees aren't losing connectivity to applications anymore. Our core banking software, which is very susceptible to packet loss and would sometimes come to a crawl, now loads customer screens instantly. It's been a vast improvement."
Delivers positive impact on customer services
Reflecting on his investment in Aruba, Ruhl concludes that the return on investment (ROI) from the Aruba SD-WAN solution was a smart way to put the bank's money to work.
"Quality was a big reason for going to SD-WAN, but another issue is cost," Ruhl points out. "Getting out to some of our rural locations is very costly with MPLS, especially when you want faster speeds. The costs can get astronomical. When we tied in all our monthly costs and factored in the capital expenditures, we realized that the total cost of the Aruba solution over five years was very justifiable."
Most important, InterBank has improved efficiencies in running the business and serving its customers. Ruhl says, "When you consider the higher quality and performance of our applications, and the impact that has on how well we can serve our customers, Aruba EdgeConnect is a smart investment."
Customer Profile
InterBank operates more than 40 locations in Texas and Oklahoma and has assets of more than $3.5 billion. The bank strives to provide outstanding service to meet the needs of its customers and contribute to the economic strength of the communities it serves.- Vertical: Financial services
- Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
- Customer size: Approximately 400 employees across 40-plus U.S. locations
Use Case
Improve quality of experience for remote locations accessing central applications to elevate employee productivity and responsiveness in serving bank customers.
Requirements
- Mitigate network downtime in 40-plus remote, rural branches
- Efficiently, securely connect to critical applications in central data centers
- Improve operational efficiency to deliver higher-quality services to customers
Outcomes
- Boosts employee productivity and quality of experience in remote locations with higher voice quality and application performance
- Consolidates the WAN edge infrastructure, retiring legacy routers and firewalls
- Assures robust security at the WAN edge with segmented trust zones
As a highly successful commercial lending bank, InterBank looks for solid investments that return value for customers and the communities it serves. So, when slow applications and inconsistent voice quality on its legacy WAN threatened to diminish productivity and customer services, InterBank decided to invest in a new WAN solution.
Daniel Ruhl, senior vice president and director of IT for InterBank, explains, "We had a very traditional MPLS network with Cisco routers and firewalls at each branch. With any circuit outage, it would disconnect applications temporarily and disrupt whatever people were working on. And we had issues with quality of service."
Improving Quality of Experience for Remote Sites
InterBank operates across Texas and Oklahoma, including several remote rural locations that struggled to connect reliably to critical applications like core banking. On the MPLS network, loading content from a remote terminal could take five or more seconds, frustrating employees and customers alike.
Ruhl saw SD-WAN as the best solution for connecting the bank's 40-plus branches with its two central data centers. But he wanted to be sure of making the right investment.
In choosing an SD-WAN vendor, Ruhl underscores a key objective: "We want to be really smart with the money we spend. If we're going to spend the company's money on technology, we want that technology to help us be more efficient in delivering high quality services to InterBank's customers and employees."
Making a Smart Investment in SD-WAN
Ruhl says he puts a lot of trust in Gartner research, specifically its annual Magic Quadrant reports. "The fact that Aruba consistently comes in at the top of Gartner's Magic Quadrant convinced me to reach out to my partner and set up a demo."
In fact, Ruhl quickly contacted partner CDW to get a close, hands-on look at the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform, a self-driving SD-WAN by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. He appreciated how EdgeConnect provides a complete suite of SD-WAN capabilities on a single unified platform.
"EdgeConnect is so simple, you don't need a specialized network engineer," Ruhl says.
Deep network visibility helps stay ahead of issues
Ruhl also valued the template-driven deployment and management approach offered in the Aruba Orchestrator management console, which factored heavily in his final decision.
"What I really like is the reporting in Orchestrator," Rule says. "We can watch our bandwidth utilization, our voice quality. We can drill down and see exactly what's going on with the physical circuit and take that to the operator if we're having issues. That deep visibility helps us stay ahead of network issues before users notice."
Consolidates the WAN Edge on a Unified Platform
After a very thorough evaluation period, Ruhl and his team rolled out SD-WAN across the bank's branches and data centers. Each EdgeConnect appliance connects to one MPLS circuit and one broadband link, bonded to enable both underlay services to be used simultaneously.
With EdgeConnect, InterBank also has been able to consolidate its edge infrastructure, retiring its legacy Cisco routers and firewalls and instead using the routing interoperability and stateful zone-based firewall within EdgeConnect.
"All routing and edge security is now handled by EdgeConnect," Ruhl notes. "We micro-segment our network with a lot of trust zones between different VLANS. We've been able to map all our Cisco access lists into the zones in EdgeConnect using Orchestrator. Untrusted things like alarm panels and ATM machines are in their own zones on EdgeConnect. Doing all this in Orchestrator is very simple."
Dramatic Improvement in Quality and Performance
Using the centralized Orchestrator management console, Ruhl configured business intent overlays that guarantee the appropriate network resources for different application classes based on their business priority. For example, voice traffic is the highest priority, and is classified as real time, while core banking and the teller system are classified as critical.
Leveraging advanced SD-WAN capabilities provided by EdgeConnect, like path conditioning, quality of service, and dynamic path control, combined with the business intent overlays, have led to much higher quality of experience for end users, and employees are able to be more productive instead of frustrated.
Ruhl says, "Since deploying the Aruba SD-WAN, we've seen a dramatic improvement in voice quality. Employees aren't losing connectivity to applications anymore. Our core banking software, which is very susceptible to packet loss and would sometimes come to a crawl, now loads customer screens instantly. It's been a vast improvement."
Delivers positive impact on customer services
Reflecting on his investment in Aruba, Ruhl concludes that the return on investment (ROI) from the Aruba SD-WAN solution was a smart way to put the bank's money to work.
"Quality was a big reason for going to SD-WAN, but another issue is cost," Ruhl points out. "Getting out to some of our rural locations is very costly with MPLS, especially when you want faster speeds. The costs can get astronomical. When we tied in all our monthly costs and factored in the capital expenditures, we realized that the total cost of the Aruba solution over five years was very justifiable."
Most important, InterBank has improved efficiencies in running the business and serving its customers. Ruhl says, "When you consider the higher quality and performance of our applications, and the impact that has on how well we can serve our customers, Aruba EdgeConnect is a smart investment."