Always Putting the Customer Experience First, Huawei Recognized as Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for SD-WAN for Fourth Time in a Row

Huang Yonghua

Senior Marketing Manager of Huawei Datacom Product Line Campus Network

Recently, Huawei was recognized as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for SD-WAN in the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice report, Voice of the Customer for SD-WAN after receiving positive comments from multiple financial customers. This is the fourth time in a row that Huawei has received this recognition. And we believe this is a testament to the high recognition of Huawei SD-WAN by financial customers.

Huawei recognized as a 2023 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for SD-WAN

As a growing number of financial institutions around the world choose Huawei's SD-WAN Solution, Huawei continues to innovate to keep improving customer experience in financial branch interconnection. With the deepening of financial service digitalization, a new normal emerges involving interconnection between multiple clouds, multiple centers, and thousands of financial branches. The traditional private line interconnection solution features complex networking and difficult service provisioning, failing to meet the requirements of financial services. Huawei SD-WAN is highly recognized by the industry for its superior performance and rich functionality. In this field, Huawei has multiple innovative technologies that help ensure secure network interconnection, large-scale networking, and ultimate experience of key services for financial institutions.

First, most financial services comprise north-south traffic between the HQ and branches, which is why the hub-spoke networking is typically used. The HQ of a bank usually has multiple data centers. For example, a large bank in Germany has more than eight data centers, each storing different services that are invoked by branches. As such, all data centers and branches need to be deployed on the same network. Huawei delivers the industry's only 16-hub networking, far ahead of other vendors in the industry, meeting the requirements of the financial industry for high reliability and flexible networking.

Financial branches need switches to connect to services including counter, video security, ATM, and VTM services. To secure bank branches, security devices such as antivirus and intrusion prevention system (IPS) devices need to be deployed, resulting in complex networking of financial branches. Huawei innovatively launches the all-in-one financial gateway that integrates routing, switching, security, and SD-WAN capabilities, greatly reducing the networking difficulty and the number of NEs in branches. Related functions can be used on demand by purchasing corresponding licenses. This significantly simplifies the deployment, installation, and maintenance of financial branches.

Another typical pain point is that banks often have a large number of off-bank ATMs that are far away from branches, typically deployed on streets, and in need of withstanding relatively harsh environments. To support this off-bank ATM scenario, Huawei developed the wide-temperature SD-WAN router, which can operate in a wide temperature range of –40°C to +70°C and provide dual SIM cards to improve ATM network reliability. Also, locations of off-bank ATMs are typically recorded manually in tables. If an address is incorrectly recorded, the O&M personnel need to spend a lot of time searching for the corresponding ATMs, creating a heavy workload. To address this issue, Huawei routers provide the GPS module for locating these ATMs.

Banks typically have a large number of devices in branches. Yet traditional solutions require professional personnel to deploy and configure these devices one by one onsite, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. For example, for a bank with 1000 branches, manual deployment can take more than 100 person-days. Additionally, LAN- and WAN-side devices are managed by multiple controllers, lacking visualized global monitoring. To address this issue, Huawei SD-WAN Solution provides the fast deployment mode, which can replicate network configurations in batches and complete network-wide deployment in minutes. In this way, only one person-day is required for batch configuration of 1000 sites. Huawei also launched the LAN/WAN converged controller, with one controller managing up to 20,000 LAN-side and WAN-side devices, greatly reducing O&M costs.

LAN/WAN convergence platform

In financial office scenarios, audio and video conference traffic typically increases by 30% every year, and all branch traffic needs to pass through the HQ network. This invariably results in a surge in required enterprise bandwidth. And with the number of office applications increasing by 10 times in five years, as well as multiple applications preempting bandwidth resources, key applications such as video conferencing are unable to be guaranteed. Today, a major requirement of enterprise networks is to ensure VIP services such as audio and video conferencing by eliminating choppy video and audio. Huawei's SD-WAN Solution tackles this problem with the intelligent traffic steering technology. This technology can identify more than 6000 applications and dynamically select the optimal transmission path for key applications. In addition, Huawei's exclusive Adaptive Forward Error Correction (A-FEC) ensures smooth video playback even with a 30% packet loss rate.

Application-based intelligent traffic steering mechanism

As digital transformation of the financial industry deepens, Huawei's SD-WAN Solution keeps up by launching more SD-WAN innovations. Doing so improves financial branch networking at scale and enables more agile and stable financial services.

For more information about Huawei's SD-WAN Solution, visit Huawei's SD-WAN website.

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