Case Studies

LAN Audit services for a Global Bank.

Client Context: Our client is one of the world's leading banks, listed on both the London Stock Exchange and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and is in the top 25 FTSE-100 companies. It employs 30,000 people in over 500 locations in more than 50 countries in the Asia Pacific Region, South Asia , the Middle East , Africa , the United Kingdom and the Americas.

The Requirement: The Bank has 63 Branches spread over the country. It has significant amount of transaction being handled everyday which occupies a large amount of bandwidth for the company. They wanted a LAN Audit to be performed to check Network capability and to ensure that the network is managed efficiently.

There were 2 Locations to be audited.

Features of first location

• The location had many buildings with multiple runs of Fiber connecting all of them. They had a copper based Intra Building Connectivity. On the Traffic segregation Architecture front, although there was department wise traffic segregation, there were no access control needs and had an unrestricted VLAN span.
• Half of the Fibre uplinks blocked by the single instance of Spanning Tree
• Access Switches interconnections not engineered properly at most of the locations.
• Current Traffic Segregation did not aid Optimum Network usage

Features of second location

• This Location had one building which was wired with UTP cables for multiple floors and Hub rooms.
• Full redundant Core switches with L3 blades
• Access Layer with hubs/ Switches
• 100 Mbps UTP Access to Core-Distribution Risers
• Single Access to Core-Distribution uplink.
• VLAN's span across the campus

The Solution : Netsol approached the situation with a 4 pronged Strategy which consisted of the following:

Step 1. Capture Key Business Communication Drivers
Step 2.Vet the existing LAN architecture against the Business Communication Drivers.
Step 3. Highlight the Advantages and Limitations
Step 4. Suggest options to patch the short falls.

Netsol objectives at both the locations were to highlight the inconsistencies in the existing LAN design and recommend Reengineering/Optimisation options in alignment with the key business communication drivers. These options were evaluated and finally the best of them were selected.

The Benefits: Netsol's solutions enabled the Bank to upgrade their network and increase the efficiency of performance. Netsol's solutions were in line with the bank's long term needs of  

• Appropriately Engineered & Dedicated Bandwidth.
• Link level resilience between Access & Core-Distribution Layers.
• Optimum utilization of IT investment