The Internet has changed every industry, and banking is no exception. Allied Irish Banks (AIB), for instance, now has more offsite ATMs and merchant devices (500) than it has branches (300). A majority of its bank transactions already take place somewhere other than its headquarters or branches, and AIB wants to accelerate that trend by adding self-service kiosks, intelligent deposit devices, and more mobile and online banking services. AIB’s goal of improving customer experience comes with another critical business objective: prudent risk management.
These business imperatives requires a robust and scalable network, which makes management of Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and IP address services (DDI) extremely critical. A network failure would mean “we wouldn’t be able to operate effectively—back to paper transactions!” says Daniel Turner, network planner for the telecoms group within AIB IT.
The bank had a complex system before adopting Infoblox: one vendor for internal IP address management (IPAM) and another for external IPAM, as well as requiring a front-end enterprise server separate from the DNS appliance. Even worse, its system had a per-IP-address licensing system that would trigger higher costs whenever the bank wanted to expand.
AIB compared the three-year cost of its current system with a new integrated system, such as the platform provided by Infoblox. The bank discovered that switching was the more effective option, and after a year or two would provide a substantial saving to the business. In addition to saving money, the new integrated solution could reduce the time and effort involved in supporting core network services.
AIB chose Infoblox’s DDI solution. “What Infoblox did excellently,” says Turner, “is give us a solution that replicated the functionality we had, but didn’t require nearly as much attention. The Infoblox solution has freed me up to manage more systems, and we’ve had fewer issues. We’ve gotten time savings from the ease of operations, maintenance, and upgrades.”
To see the entire AIB case study, click here.
We see hundreds of our customers making similar choices in using an automated and integrated platform to efficiently scale their infrastructure. This is often the first step in a journey our customers take with Infoblox, as our platform allows them to extend their DDI implementation and their device and firewall protection systems to provide superior security by offering secure DNS. More on this in my next post and, to conclude, we are proud to enable AIB in their quest to provide superior customer service without needing to lose sleep over their network.