Opengear, a leading provider of critical infrastructure management solutions through advanced console servers, remote management, monitoring, and cellular out-of-band products, today announced that Turkish banking group, Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası, has deployed Opengear's Remote Management Gateways at Bank's branch office sites with plans to roll out Opengear technology to a further 145 sites including several critical data centre locations.
Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası has 250 branches and approximately 4000 staff serving over 1 million customers across Turkey and internationally. The bank has a proactive attitude to protecting its IT systems and decided it needed to improve remote connectivity to critical infrastructure in branch locations, to help detect and resolve issues.
The bank turned for advice to CTS Bilisim, an Istanbul based expert in data centre and server room monitoring and management technology. Following a thorough evaluation process of competing solutions, 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 the ease with which 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 solution has improved the IT departments' ability to both 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 closely 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, to ensure rigid security compliance around sensitive financial transactions. For its high-density data centre environments, 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 additional 145 sites during 2014.