Telangana State Co-Operative Apex Bank goes live with Software-Defined Branch solution

Telangana State Co-Operative Apex Bank (TSCAB), a state cooperative bank is implementing Software-Defined Branch (SD-Branch) solution to enable seamless core banking applications access. This enables centralised branch management, monitoring and troubleshooting of gateways and network switches across its 413 branch offices and data centres. The entire solution will be monitored, managed, and orchestrated using Aruba Central, a cloud-native service designed to unify the management of campus, branch, remote and data centre networks, provided by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

“The company’s router-centric architecture was expensive and complex, requiring multiple devices and extensive integration. Complicating matters, the legacy network hardware was approaching end of life, and in some cases, was no longer supported and was responsible for many of the network issues,” said Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Director, India at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “These network challenges are addressed with the Aruba SD-Branch platform, which unifies SD-WAN, firewall, segmentation, routing, WAN optimisation and application visibility and control in a single platform. Aruba’s SD-Branch solutions provide compelling operational and financial benefits over traditional router-centric WAN architectures.”

For TSCAB, enhancing customer experience is now possible with a wider adoption of technology and alternative delivery channels. Its new network infrastructure powered by Aruba solutions will help increase agility, optimise overall performance and adhere to stringent network security and compliance requirements – therefore future-proofing their organisation on what lies ahead.

“Today, we have the ideal network for our bank. Providing best-in-class customer experience required state-of-the-art IT and networking infrastructure. Aruba understood our networking needs and helped us simplify network monitoring, troubleshooting, and management while simultaneously ensuring maximum availability and high levels of security, without costing a fortune,” said Muppaneni Srinivasasa Rao, Chief Information Officer, TSCAB.

Aruba’s SD-Branch solution combines wireless, wired and WAN infrastructure with management capabilities that include assurance and orchestration features to help maximise performance and minimise operational costs. A Unified Infrastructure model gives organisations a way to simplify the deployment, configuration, and management of everything within a branch location and across the WAN using a single pane of glass management.

“As TSCAB began searching for product and solution providers that can help us embrace SD-WAN, Aruba soon became the ideal option. We went through a scrupulous evaluation process and as a result, we chose the Aruba SD-Branch solution that met our requirements,” said Rajasekhar Chowdary, Head – IT Infrastructure & Information Security, TSCAB.

“Upon implementing the new solution, we immediately experienced changes in efficiency through features like dynamic path selection that helped optimise how traffic moved between branches, data centers, and clouds. This also brought down costs and allowed SD-WAN to determine congestion issues to proactively divert traffic,” Chowdary added.

As a result, the bank can now easily gauge branch network requirements, and optimise them accordingly, all intelligently managed from Aruba Central’s single point of control. The Aruba SD-Branch, including the next-generation Aruba gateways, also enforce a Zero Trust environment to ensure optimal security – from built-in firewall to dynamic segmentation, and Intrusion Detection Systems and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) in place, TSCAB has complete control and visibility on user access to their network.