Packet Enhanced OTN Premium Private Line Network Helps Bank Informatization
By Zhang Rui, Transmission Marketing Support Dept
The development and application of mobility, big data, Internet, and cloud computing brings cross-industry competition from third-party payment, e-commerce, and other companies to the financial, payment, and loan market. Consequently, commercial banks are implementing data concentration projects in an effort to innovate and build a smarter and sustainable business development model.
The Jiangsu Branch of Bank A in China (the bank for short) is a tier-1 branch of Bank A. It has been adhering to the customer-centricity strategy to provide premium and efficient financial services for customers through constant innovation. It is one of the early adopters of data concentration.
Data Concentration Increases the Pressure on Private Line Networks
The data concentration project consists of six sub-projects. These are: core service system (or CCBS), front-end and client-facing interface, backbone network reconstruction, data center, disaster recovery, and promotion organization. The network architecture of the entire bank needs to be adjusted to implement data concentration.
Firstly, the bank has more than 2000 sub-branches, tens of millions of customer accounts, and huge core customer data. After data concentration, these sub-branches must transfer their data to the bank in real time, rather than firstly processing data on their own systems. However, this raises the requirements for transmission bandwidth of the backbone network.
Secondly, the transmission of large volumes of financial data has even higher requirements on network security and operation quality. This is partly because banks need to provide 24/7 services. Therefore, networks need to be self-healing to ensure a guaranteed smooth customer experience should any faults occur.
Lastly, the bank requires various bandwidths for different scenarios, such as payments and money transfers during peak periods, HD video conferencing, real-time security and surveillance, and bandwidth assurance for emergencies. Elastic and adjustable bandwidth is required to handle these scenarios.
China Telecom Jiangsu's Packet Enhanced OTN Premium Private Line Network Helps Data Concentration
As an important partner of the bank, Jiangsu Branch of China Telecom (China Telecom Jiangsu for short) fully understands the bank's data concentration requirements and proposed the packet enhanced OTN premium private line network as a solution to achieve data concentration.
Packet enhanced OTN+MSTP networking improves bandwidth. Currently, OTN provides the highest transmission bandwidth, supporting 100G/wavelength and smooth evolution to 200G without replacing the main equipment. This means there is enough bandwidth to support data concentration. Moreover, the existing MSTP devices of the 2000+ sub-branches are fully utilized. The seamless integration of MSTP and packet enhanced OTN can carry public network services on the VC plane of the packet enhanced OTN network. Therefore, customer services are processed without the need for a home visit.
ASON technology supports various SLAs and hitless network protection switching. OTN provides exclusive service bandwidth and physical isolation, protecting banking services from the interference of other services. With the rich network protection mechanisms of OTN and the ASON function, the bank can provide multiple SLA protection levels (silver, diamond, and permanent diamond) for its customers, achieving 99.999% availability and providing differentiated services for customers with varying availability requirements.
Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) improves network flexibility. This ensures sufficient bandwidth during peak hours.
A Success Case in Jiangsu
Following transport network reconstruction, the bank helped increase the settlement efficiency of provincial branches and sub-branches by half. The data concentration minimizes the informatization costs of branches, network faults, and security risks while enabling big data analytics.
The packet enhanced OTN+MSTP reconstruction solution allows China Telecom Jiangsu to customize a premium private line network for the bank and achieve huge revenues.
The growth of Internet finance along with the speed of economic transformation and free up interest rates and service changes, bank profits have stopped growing. Easy money will become a thing of the past. Fierce market competition requires more support from information technologies, such as the cooperation between China Telecom Jiangsu and the bank, which has opened up more possibilities for informatization while driving banking transformation.