Consolidating Gains: A leading Indian Bank drives network transformation with Airtel SD-WAN

This leading Bank is an Indian public sector bank serving over 100 million customers with 45,000 employees across 5000+ branches in central and remote locations across the country.

The Challenge

The Rising network woes: Hindering the customer’s critical banking operations

Due to frequent network issues, internal teams had been struggling to facilitate crucial user banking apps and real-time transactions, leaving the customers frustrated at times. Slow performance and interruptions plagued critical functions like online banking and sales, impacting customer experience and agility. Their multi-vendor MPLS only setup across India resembled a tangled web, lacking a single point of contact for troubleshooting and escalating issues. This not only inflated individual branch network costs but also restricted connectivity in remote branches, limiting their day-to-day transactions.

Adding to the IT team’s woes, decentralized network management and fragmented visibility made it difficult to control application traffic, troubleshoot issues, and enforce security at individual branches. This hampered application performance, proactive management and swift response to threats.

In essence, network infrastructure became a bottleneck, throttling their day-to-day banking operations and expansion plans.

The Solution

Streamlining the entire network with SD-WAN solution 

The customer’s network concerns, characterized by sluggish performance, limited reach and reliance on multiple vendors, hindered both customer experience and operational agility. Seeking a comprehensive solution, they implemented SD-WAN in a cloud-based environment.  Think of it as an intelligent traffic controller for their complete IT network, offering real-time visibility and centralized control, empowering their IT teams to optimize application performance and ensure critical operations reliability.

Through a user-friendly management console, the IT team was able to define routing and prioritize network traffic effectively, ensuring smooth operation of critical banking applications. Additionally, they could implement granular security policies at application and site levels, bolstering local internet breakout for cloud applications.

The best part? SD-WAN solution intelligently combined end-media options like MPLS, broadband, and internet leased line based on site categorization, boosting reliability and eliminating reliance on specific vendors. Moreover, the solution facilitated a seamless transition to Public Cloud Platform, enabling the customer to phase out legacy infrastructure hosted by a third-party colocation provider. This migration enabled scalability, agility, and efficiency, aligning with the bank’s digital transformation goals.

The Impact

Transforming the network: The bank’s journey to cost savings, efficiency, and growth 

Network worries are a thing of the past, thanks to the SD-WAN implementation! It has unlocked significant cost savings and operational efficiency gains. They’re anticipating a 35%-40% reduction in network expenditures by eliminating reliance on traditional MPLS connectivity and multiple vendors. A flexible OPEX model, based on actual network consumption, further optimized the cost.

Additionally, managing the entire network is now easy with a single point of contact overseeing both SD-WAN and connectivity services. Direct connectivity to the public cloud from site locations has ensured seamless application access. This also meant that all the critical banking applications and transactions and real-time ran seamlessly. The intelligent and diverse network connections have also enabled the bank to quickly expand into new markets and larger customer segments. Overall, the strategic network upgrade to SD-WAN has delivered cost savings, simplified management, and positioned this organization for strong future growth.