A Turkish banking group, Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası, has deployed Opengear’s Remote Management Gateways at branch offices. The bank plans to roll out the IT to a further 145 sites including several critical data centre locations.
Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası has 250 branches and 4000 staff serving one million customers across Turkey and internationally. The bank sought to improve remote connectivity to critical infrastructure in branches, to help detect and resolve IT security issues. The bank turned for advice to CTS Bilisim, an Istanbul based data centre and server room monitoring and management firm. After an evaluation process, Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası selected the Opengear ACM5500 Remote Management Gateway to enable secure remote monitoring, access and control of its distributed network infrastructure and remote sites using its built-in out-of-band connectivity.
According to Erdal Ek, Senior Network Specialist for Türkiye Finans: “Opengear had a clear price and performance advantage compared to other products we evaluated and it also had several advanced features that we felt offered us additional benefits.”
Erdal Ek highlights built-in remote site access including PSTN and cellular, and how remote admins can upload managed device configuration and operating system images from Opengear’s internal flash drive for remote bare-metal provisioning and repair of critical systems.
The bank has installed Opengear at branches across the country and Erdal Ek confirms that the out-of-band product has improved the IT departments’ ability to manage and configure remote devices during installation or if a problem arises. “Opengear saves us time and allows us to quickly understand and resolve a wide range of problems and ultimately increase customer satisfaction,” Erdal Ek adds.
Working with CTS Bilisim, an Opengear partner, the bank is upgrading each branch with Opengear Remote Management Gateways, integrating a secure serial console server and remote access gateway hardened with stateful firewall, FIPS 140-2 certified SSL, strong-cipher SSH, OpenVPN and IPsec VPN, for security compliance around sensitive financial transactions. For its high-density data centres, the bank has specified the Opengear IM series Infrastructure Managers offering up to 48 console connections in a single rack unit.
Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası plans to complete roll out to an extra 145 sites during 2014.
