Remote Management
– Rick Stevenson, CEO of Opengear, says:
Remote management of data centers is crucial to the uninterrupted flow of business. In today’s world of ever-more-sparsely staffed data centers and enterprises operating critical networks across numerous and remote sites, out-of band solutions allow for rapid responses to network issues that arise – issues that are otherwise costly and require inefficient travel to out-of-the-way locations. Inevitably, data center outages happen and every kind of industry can be affected. But in the financial services industry it is mission-critical to respond and repair networks when they go down as rapidly as possible. Uptime is money and outages can spell monetary disaster. For this reason, financial services companies are among the biggest adopters of out-of-band management technology.
The Turkish participation bank Türkiye Finanssought out-of-band technology to take a proactive stance in ensuring the safety of its critical data centers and IT systems. With 267 branches and 4,400 staff serving over 2,5 million customers across Turkey and internationally, the bank recognized the importance of strengthening remote connectivity to critical infrastructure at its branch locations. Turkiye Finans took its unique set of needs to CTS Bilisim, an expert in data center and server room monitoring and management technology based in Istanbul, and conducted a thorough process of evaluating competing solutions.
At the conclusion of this process they chose Opengear’s ACM5500 Remote Management Gateway to do the job. The ACM5500 uses integrated out-of-band connectivity to enable secure remote monitoring, access, and control of the bank’s distributed network infrastructure and remote sites. On selecting Opengear for their solution, Türkiye Finans IT Technology and Infrastructure Management Vice President Fikri Bülent Çelik explains, “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.” Advanced features he emphasizes include built-in remote site access including PSTN and cellular, and the simplicity with which admins can remotely upload managed device configuration and operating system images from Opengear’s internal flash drive for remote bare-metal provisioning and repair of critical systems. With Opengear installed at bank locations across the country, Fikri Bülent Çelik confirms the success of the out-of-band solution in enabling their IT department to deftly manage and configure remote devices, both during installation and when issues occur. He adds, “Opengear saves us time and allows us to quickly understand and resolve a wide range of problems and ultimately increase customer satisfaction.”
The bank is now upgrading each branch location 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, ensuring stringent security compliance around sensitive financial transactions. For its high-density data center environments, the bank has specified the Opengear IM series Infrastructure Managers offering up to 48 console connections in a single rack unit. Türkiye Finans now plans to complete rolling out their Opengear solution to an additional 145 sites in 2014.
Rick Stevenson is CEO of Opengear, a company that builds remote infrastructure management solutions for enterprises.
