Banca Popolare di Sondrio is a 151-year-old bank in Italy, one of the oldest financial institutions in the country and a leader in the cooperative banking movement. The bank employs nearly 3,000 people across 500 branches and a digital presence, offering services to individuals, businesses and public organizations.
With such a large footprint across the country and an increased emphasis on new digital capabilities, Banca Popolare needed to ensure reliable, high-performance connectivity for sites and applications. Initially, the bank managed these services with an MPLS network that connected all 500 branches, with certain sites augmented by additional connectivity to ensure performance. However, as new digital capabilities were offered, managing application and service performance that is reliant on WAN became a challenge. The network operations team had to use multiple network flow, diagnostic, and troubleshooting tools – alongside special tools used by development and help desk teams to remediate network related performance issues. Other tasks, such as capacity planning, were made more difficult due to lack of organization-wide WAN visibility.
To address these challenges, Banca Popolare deployed ExtremeCloud SD-WAN (formerly Ipanema) to gain full application visibility and control without the need to install additional hardware appliances at each branch. Through a unique hybrid SD-WAN architecture, Banca Popolare could dynamically manage complex application traffic across the MPLS network, accelerate response time through optimization protocols, and provide virtual bandwidth by reducing the volume of data transmitted over the network.
“As we evolve our digital services, it offers us a solid foundation to better plan our future network requirements and the flexibly to add capacity in a seamless way to meet our business goals.”
Claudio Libera, Network Engineer for Banca Popolare di Sondrio.
Banca Popolare implemented new management policies that give them instant insight into how applications and services are performing at every site connected to the WAN
Performance alerts are both highly-targeted and granular, providing IT teams with the right information so they can quickly identify, assess, and troubleshoot issues
Deeper visibility and insight into network performance gives Banca Popolare the confidence to add capacity and plan for future support of digital services to better meet business goals
