Case Study: Credit Union Invests in their Future
The Challenge:
Like other financial institutions, our credit union customer counts on 100% network uptime to serve their customers in an efficient, always-on manner. So, when their network was down, they were effectively out of business at the affected locations. Although complete outages didn’t happen often, the prospect of keeping their customers waiting for a fix—especially when finances are involved—was a major concern.
What’s more, the organization had multiple IT and network vendors that made managing and fixing issues a real struggle for their small, six-member IT team. They needed a strong vendor to be their single point of contact to better streamline issues management.
Finally, the high-performing team had plans to introduce innovative new solutions, but knew they lacked the bandwidth to implement them.
The Solution:
After careful consideration of their options, the customer team decided to go with an SD-WAN solution in an active/active configuration, thanks to new dual fiber and broadband connections. Not only would the system reduce outages, but it would provide the bandwidth needed to support cloud-based applications and other new innovations the team had in the works.
Besides having access to the customer portal to monitor network performance, reporting and trouble ticketing, the customer also opted to deploy the MNS (Managed Network Security), which includes a remote access solution.
After careful consideration of their options, the customer team decided to go with an SD-WAN solution in an active/active configuration, thanks to new dual fiber and broadband connections. Not only would the system reduce outages, but it would provide the bandwidth needed to support cloud-based applications and other new innovations the team had in the works.
Besides having access to the customer portal to monitor network performance, reporting and trouble ticketing, the customer also opted to deploy the MNS (Managed Network Security), which includes a remote access solution.
The Results:
The team reports that the SD-WAN solution has been extremely flexible and easy to deploy across their 15-location network. Furthermore, the customer is pleased that it enables them to get newly acquired branches up and running very quickly. When the credit union recently had a branch shut down, we were able to move the SD-WAN device to another branch, which had them up and running in less than 24 hours.
The new solution not only improves bandwidth and connectivity, but also provides a single point of contact within the organization to streamline issues management. Additionally, the customer portal allows their team to monitor and manage the network easily, and the MNS Cloud helped move the network security off their teams, allowing them to focus on other projects to improve customer experience.
As an added benefit, the solution performed well when the COVID-19 pandemic forced many members of the credit union to work from home.
The SD-WAN solution enabled their four open branches to stay connected as others worked remotely, and they were able to add video meetings without impacting bandwidth. The customer was also pleased with the VPN connection security powered by the MNS Cloud firewall protection.