VTB Bank | Increase Application Performance Customers

VTB Bank is a Russian commercial bank with state participation, a key element under VTB Group. It is the second largest bank in Russia in terms of assets and the first in terms of share capital size. The main activities of the bank include working with corporate clients and financial institutions, government agencies and enterprises.

Challenges

• Implementation of new centralised information systems has increased the requirements for communication channels to enable good performance of business-critical applications
• Poor application performance directly influenced employee productivity

Solution

• SteelHead CX appliances
• SteelHead Interceptor
• SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead

Benefits

• Reduction of traffic by 62% allowed the bank to optimise the operations of its information systems and reduce costs of increase of bandwidth of communication channels
• Increase in productivity of employees in branch offices
• Increase in application performance and business operations speed
• Acceleration of work via satellite links

Challenge: Achieving application performance, optimal for clients and employees

With the introduction of automated workflow in all branches the bank faced a number of difficulties caused by the increase in traffic. Network bandwidth and distance led to delays in operations of business-critical applications. This, in its turn, increased costs and decreased employee productivity. The necessity to optimise and prioritize traffic between data centers and branch offices drove the company to seek a special solution for WAN-optimisation, which could optimise the performance of both the employees of the bank and its customers. At the first stage of the project, the bank evaluated several vendors, who were considered market leaders by the leading analytical agencies.<!-- page-break -->

After objective testing, the IT team opted for a system of traffic optimisation and application acceleration demonstrated in the Riverbed SteelHead solution. At the second stage of the project they determined optimal settings for the implementation and deployment of solutions in the entire branch network of VTB. The implemented solution, providing high reliability and business continuity, included Riverbed Interceptor for load balancing and scalability, SteelHead CX for optimising application performance and Riverbed CMC, the traffic management system.

“With the help of the Riverbed solutions we managed to decrease the volume of data transferred in all branches and data centers by 62%, thus freeing the bandwidth for the critical business and multimedia applications”, says Dmitry Nazipov, Head of Information Technology Department — Senior Vice President of VTB Bank. “This allowed improving the application performance, business operations speed and return on investment for the bank”.