Capital One Leverages Versa’s Secure Cloud Software for Retail WAN Transformation
Versa Networks
November 13, 2018
Capital One offers financial products and services to consumers, small businesses and commercial clients. The company needed to modernize their branch and infrastructure for retail banking operations. They wanted to ensure their branch-to-branch and internal branch connectivity, including guest WiFi services, were reliable and secure. Guest WiFi availability had evolved from simply allowing customers to browse the web and social media, to becoming a business-critical service that needed to be secure, reliable and always available.
The bank required a complete digital transformation solution offering technology that would reflect how their customers interact with bank services. Branch offices and cafes are becoming a financial hub, where customers learn how to set up services like automatic bill pay and fund transfers on their smartphones. Customers cash checks and make deposits using self-services on mobile devices, and tellers come out from behind the counters, sit down with customers working with tablets, to help them with their financial needs and open new accounts.
Micro-segmentation of multiple classes of network traffic was a major technical requirement.
Challenge
Capital One needed to shorten network provisioning time for new retail branches and cafes. Provisioning fiber could take 3-6 months and would often delay a branch opening when fiber wasn’t provisioned in time. If a new branch didn’t have MPLS in time, they wanted a solution to easily deploy broadband and LTE, and ensure customers had secure and reliable network access. With new branches and cafes opening up, the bank had many issues that needed to be resolved to support several hundred branch customers and employees, including:
- Combining existing MPLS with reliable and secure broadband connectivity for guest WiFi service
- Increasing bandwidth using broadband to lower costs and support new technologies that were taxing their legacy infrastructure
- Replacing their backup cellular 3G network that required manual failover, and wasn’t capable of supporting all their applications and phone systems, which was disruptive for business
- The manual processes to run hundreds of branch offices wasn’t keeping up with the technology changes they were developing
- A lack of insight needed to understand who was using the applications, and how they were being consumed
- The guest WiFi, ATM and private corporate traffic needed to be segmented, so they could deliver applications more reliably and better understand the traffic patterns
Solution – Versa Networks SD-Branch
Capital One needed a new approach to ensure a secure and quality user experience for the network services they provide in their branches and cafes. The bank’s WAN edge needed to be transformed from traditional infrastructure to a modern software-defined edge infrastructure (i.e, Secure SD-WAN) to support their branch offices. The new solution had to be cloud-ready for services like. Additionally, it had to be able to isolate traffic, and protect traffic over broadband Internet links with data encryption and key management. Besides the required technology, first-class support was a must have, as this new solution would be supporting business-critical branches.
To accomplish their digital transformation agenda, the bank chose to software-define their branches with the Versa Cloud IP Platform. Versa’s software-defined branch solution, with single, multi-function VNF that provides networking, routing, SD-WAN and multi-layered security, was exactly what the bank needed. With deployment of Versa’s Secure SD-WAN Technology, Versa enabled Capital One to simplify their branch infrastructure footprint, while lowering the cost of deployment and automating operational management.
Since deploying the software-defined branch solution; always-on, reliable and secure connectivity in the face of network adversity is something the bank has experienced first-hand. When a branch MPLS was having issues, the SD-WAN Solution automatically switched traffic, including the phones and all applications, to 75 Mbps broadband links for the three days it took to repair the MPLS service. During this time, the bank experienced zero problems with all the traffic routed to the broadband links. When the MPLS service came back online, the SD-WAN automatically routed traffic across all links.
