Discover how Arelion has been helping a global bank elevate its operations in Europe, US, and Asia with an integrated global connectivity solution. We scaled and evolved the solution over years to accommodate growing bandwidth and flexibility requirements, always delivering smart, predictable performance – with the granular visibility and centralized control a global bank needs.
This global bank offers a wide range of financial services that include retail and corporate banking as well as asset management, stock trading and treasury services. Operating in 21 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.
Initially working with multiple local, national, and regional suppliers, seven 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, latency, and predictability it needed — along with the freedom to control and route traffic according to its own protocols. Over time, Arelion has replaced all previous suppliers, offering a one-stop-shop catering to the bank’s total global connectivity requirements.
In the latest evolution, the bank has decided to take advantage of SD-WAN technology – Arelion was there to offer technical expertise and to evolve existing connectivity solution, taking it to the next level with very high bandwidth, low latency, any-to-any underlay – connecting all sites together in full mesh with Ethernet LAN for best SD-WAN performance. Customer remains in control of the IP layer – including flexibility to select the SD-WAN partner that suits best and knowing that the connectivity underlay will simply work!
Briefly, Arelion's solution can be described as a private high-capacity Ethernet LAN connecting local and global sites, plus local DIA for direct connection to Internet, resulting in a perfect underlay for SD-WAN.
With multiple data centers (DCs) and a service 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, MACsec as well as offers MTU jumbo frame support. This approach enables the bank to create and control its own routing principles across Arelion's protected MPLS backbone – a perfect underlay for the selected SD WAN solution.
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.
The solution evolved from primary and backup EVPLs (point-to-point Ethernet connections) with diverse fixed path routing, to full mesh ELAN (any-to-any Ethernet LAN) connecting all the sites in a given geography together. It benefits from dynamic automatic rerouting ensuring always-on connectivity and has been delivered over Arelion’s low latency plane for best performance.
Main hub-sites are connected using high-capacity Ethernet links with flexibility on routing solution between and within the geographically diverse networks, 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 connect 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. Next step looks at adding private connectivity to cloud (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle) using Arelion’s Cloud Connect offering which can also be delivered on the same port.
A single, streamlined and now also simplified global connectivity solution, which evolved over years to accommodate new technologies, 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 and select SD-WAN provider that best suits their need. 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, as well as evolve solution in line with customer needs, Arelion has become the bank’s trusted advisor and one-stop-shop for all things related to global connectivity.
