Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 89 | Page 56

CASE STUDY
For Halkbank , the goal was to provide 100 % availability for all its services , and therefore the Bank needed a solution to help them to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to network management .
Without a robust solution in place , finding the source of issues to resolve would be challenging , and if the issue was not related to the network the IT team would also need to be alerted .
Across Halkbank ’ s customers , mobile is the most used channel , followed by Internet banking and physical branches . “ If mobile banking went down for even a few hours customers would not be able to access their account or process transactions ,” adds Uçkan .
“ With an increase in the number of users , there is corresponding increase in the traffic on the network which can cause bottlenecks and impact application performance and user experience . To prevent this , banks need to carefully monitor applications and analyse how they scale ,” explains Riverbed ’ s Migally .

Halkbank is one of the largest banks in Turkey and has 15 + million customers , four million digital customers , 23,000 employees , 1,000 + branches , and is supported by an IT team of 1,000 skilled staff .

Over the last ten years , Halkbank has been using Riverbed SteelHead across 1,000 + branches for WAN Optimisation , and network and application performance . Rivedbed ’ s solutions have helped to ensure Halkbank ’ s business critical applications are always available for its business users .
“ Riverbed SteelHead has been used to accelerate the performance of the internal banking applications that are utilised by its own employees ,” says Mena Migally , Regional Vice President – Emerging EMEA , Riverbed .
Network challenges
Solution selection
Enterprises moving down the path of scaling and bringing in network monitoring solutions usually stray down two common dead ends that can cause pain points to increase rather than decrease .
The first is to bring in point solutions from a new vendor that do not integrate and orchestrate with the existing network performance monitoring stack . Using thirdparty , siloed tools , for troubleshooting at the application , network , and device levels can be complicated and time-consuming in terms of integration .
The second is to focus excessively in trying to identify the sources of performance bottlenecks , when sometimes being able to identify those parts of the network and applications that are not creating an issue , are equally useful .
However , due to the fast-growing base of digital customers , the requirement for the bank was to find an integrated solution that would ensure sufficient network performance . A network performance monitoring solution provides both performance and security monitoring across all types of network environments – physical , virtual , hybrid , and multi-cloud .
Says Namik Kemal Uçkan , Head of Information Technology Operations at Halkbank , “ We needed to increase the capacity of our network performance management tool to ensure we could identify network issues before they risked disrupting services for customers and impacting our reputation .”
Network administrators using network performance solutions cannot waste time chasing multiple possibilities . Eliminating what is not causing an issue can also help to decrease the overall mean time to respond . The remedy lies in being able to resolve these performance and availability issues rapidly .
Building the solution
To tackle these challenges , Halkbank decided to continue its long-term relationship with Riverbed and has scaled its capability using solutions from Riverbed . Halkbank is now using Riverbed ’ s Alluvio Network Performance Management to monitor the 40 + business
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