Allied Irish Banks Secures Its Mobile And Digital Banking

Ashish_Gupta

The Internet has changed every industry, and banking is no exception. Allied Irish Banks (AIB), for instance, has more offsite ATMs and merchant devices (500) than it has branches (300). A majority of its bank transactions already take place somewhere other than its headquarters or branches, but it wants to accelerate that trend by adding self-service kiosks, intelligent deposit devices, and mobile and online banking services – all in the name of serving its consumer and small-and-midsize business customers.

 

That makes the management of Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and IP address management (IPAM) extremely critical. A network failure would mean “We wouldn’t be able to operate effectively—back to paper transactions!” says Daniel Turner, network planner for the Telecoms group within AIB IT.

 

The bank had a complex system: one vendor for internal IPAM and another for external IPAM. Its data required a front-end enterprise server separate from the DNS appliance. Even worse, its system had a per-IP-address licensing system that would trigger higher costs whenever the bank wanted to expand.

 

AIB compared the three-year cost of its current system with a new system from Infoblox. The comparison indicated that switching to Infoblox was the more economical option, and after a year or two would provide a substantial saving to the business. In addition to saving money, the Infoblox solution could reduce the time and effort involved in supporting core network services.

 

“What Infoblox did excellently,” says Turner, “is give us a solution that replicated the functionality we had, but didn’t require nearly as much attention. The Infoblox solution has freed me up to manage more systems, and we’ve had fewer issues. We’ve gotten time savings from the ease of operations, maintenance, and upgrades.”