Huawei Datacom Solution Help CitySavings Bank Build Intelligent Network

As digital transformation accelerates, financial institutions face many challenges, such as upgrading IT infrastructure and networks to provide efficient and consistent services to customers, ensuring the security of customer sensitive data, reducing and improving operating expenses, and ensuring that energy consumption and IT expenses are controllable. These challenges directly affect whether financial institutions can remain competitive in the ever-changing banking industry. As a result, network upgrades have become a top priority.

Over the past few years, SD-WAN has become increasingly popular. SD-WAN applies SDN technology to WANs to connect enterprise networks, data centers, Internet applications, and cloud services across large regions. SD-WAN helps financial institutions reduce costs and build WANs with open architecture, flexible programming, and easy O&M to support increasingly diversified service traffic. As a result, services will enable demand-driven networks, and networks will dynamically adapt to services. This makes great sense for businesses in the cloudy era.

Simple is Good——Start from SD-WAN Project

As one of the largest savings banks in the Philippines, CitySavings Bank (CSB) actively embraces new technology. It provides a range of mass market financial products and services such as salary loans to public and private school teachers, pension loans to GSIS and SSS pensioners, motorcycle loans, company loans, LGU salary loans, and traditional deposit products. With its basic philosophy of "Simple is Good", CitySavings Bank offers its clients simple and straightforward banking, coupled with warm and helpful service, relevant products, and digital innovations to ensure the best customer experience.

In 2022, due to the rapid growth and expansion of online services, CitySavings Bank decided to use Huawei SD-WAN to upgrade its network infrastructure to ensure smooth operation and ensure that branch networks can provide consistent services. Huawei helps CSB design the SD-WAN network architecture based on their requirements. It has a full mesh architecture, that is highly redundant with dual dedicated links, LTE backup as part of the 3-link redundancy architecture.

The new infrastructure aims to help CSB improve the efficiency of all its banking services and enhance user experience for the traditional branch interactions. In this project, Huawei provided the iMaster NCE-Campus O&M platform for CSB. The platform can display key O&M quality of devices, applications, and traffic, visualize application traffic of all branches, learn dynamic data in a timely manner, and adjust bandwidth of each branch in a timely manner. Achieve efficient and intelligent operations.

Customer Benefit

Dexter Aranas, the Infrastructure and Services Management Head of CitySavings Bank, said, “Upon implementation and go-live of the SD-WAN solution, the Bank’s network administrators were able to see the benefits of the unified management of NCE. Though, previously, load balancing is available on the old setup It was improved through dynamically selecting the best link based on the link quality with automatic failover based on the threshold set in NCE of the link’s reliability. Prioritization of traffic thru intuitive traffic steering per application can also be easily achieved and configured via the NCE and can be easily deployed on the branch SD-WAN routers. Traditional Operations and Management of the team were enhanced and made the life of my network administrators easy, be it managing/monitoring the infrastructure, doing troubleshooting on the branches or deployment of device, in which, can all be done via a zero-touch deployment.”