Bank Case Study

A Major European Bank Implements MPVPN Solution for Complete Link Redundancy to Support its Mission Critical Virtual Private Network for at its North American Locations

A large banking institution based in Frankfurt, Germany initiated an IT solution that would provide link redundancy at its North American Locations due to growth in the region. Although the bank is concentrated primarily in Europe as one of Europe’s leading private-sector banks servicing roughly 6 million customers worldwide, it also operates in key international markets including the United States.

The bank implemented a new IT policy at its North American locations to lend support to its mission critical VPN traffic that required failover “pipe” functionality. The bank needed complete link redundancy for each of its US branch offices to its US-based headquarters in New York City, and a site-to-site failover from its UT headquarters to its disaster recovery site. All critical data transmissions run across VPN connections, and domain controllers and application servers reside at the Headquarters.

The bank’s IT department chose to implement FatPipe’s MPVPN technology over a BGP solution because FatPipe was able to address its need for redundancy at a low cost without having to make major changes to its current network. The main deciding factors were seamless integration, along with easy installation and adaptation into its network, as well as achieving dynamic load balancing of VPN traffic over multiple VPN tunnels, and the flexibility to use any type of data line connectivity.

The bank’s IT department introduced two 50 Mbps MPVPN units – one at the US headquarters and one at the disaster recovery site — along with six 2Mbps units at three branch office locations to accomplish their objective. Each branch office has two, 2Mbps units for failover purposes. DSLs were aggregated at each branch office, and a combination of DSLs and T1s at the headquarters and disaster recovery sites

The bank was happy with the results. One of its managers commented, “When one of the two DSL lines went offline (at any of the US branch offices), FatPipe MPVPN equipment was able to auto-detect and route all VPN traffic to the next DSL line and not affect the branch office VPN connections.”

Its implementation of MPVPN for link redundancy is consistent with the bank’s overall IT strategy. All application servers are replicated and synchronized between the two sites. MPVPN ensures that applications and servers are accessible to all users at all times.

This European based bank needed a cost effective VPN redundancy solution for its North American locations that provided Internet failover functionality and site-to-site redundancy from its headquarters to its disaster recovery site.

The bank installed 8 MPVPN units at 5 locations to support its VPN and thin client network. MPVPN auto detects connection failures, and reroutes all VPN traffic to available lines.

FatPipe MPVPN provides dynamic failover from downed data lines without breaking the branch offices’ VPN connections. Has site-to-site failover from all data lines going to the US headquarters to failover from the headquarters to the disaster recovery location via MPVPN.

Whichever option is decided upon, IT Managers should ensure that redundancies are available at all times.