Dutch-Bangla Bank Limited Enhances Performance and Access to Its Banking Services with F5 Solutions

The Dutch-Bangla Bank Limited, Bangladesh's first joint-venture bank, was exploring ways to ensure peak performance and availability of their Core Banking, Mobile Banking, Agent Banking,  Switching and Internet banking applications across three data centers. Leveraging a high-performance F5 solution, the bank managed to reduce system downtime and vastly improve end user experience.

Solution

DBBL opted for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP DNS to leverage the modules’ load balancing features. The failover process between three data centers was automated for the bank’s CBS, MBS, ABS, Switching and Internet-facing applications. The bank also deployed BIG-IP Link Controller to load balance data traffic across demilitarized zones of the data centers.F5 technology was integrated with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to streamline the IT environment and create a centralized policy control. 

The solution improved the capacity of DBBL’s servers and optimized SSL traffic management to efficiently address incoming queries and respond to them from all the Banking Systems. The bank could now guarantee service stability and ensure a high-quality user experience.

Benefits

With the appropriate routing of all incoming traffic, DBBL can efficiently respond to customer queries and ensure greater reliability, performance, availability, and security for all its digital banking services.

No revenue loss due to application outage

BIG-IP LTM and BIG-IP DNS diverted the incoming traffic between the bank’s data centers, and balanced the load of the incoming traffic. This reduced the load on the servers and prevented application outages. By doing so, DBBL was able to reduce costs of maintenance and avoid revenue loss. In addition, data center consolidation and technology standardization with F5 and Cisco also lead to cost savings. The power and throughput of the F5/ACI solution now means fewer data centers can handle more computational work.

“Application downtime was a serious concern for us, since in the banking sector it can lead to significant business loss as well as reputation loss. By eliminating app outages, we were able to prevent any downtime and consequently avoided any adverse impact to the business,” explained Mr. Shakil.

Improved end user experience

F5 solutions reduced the load on the servers and helped the bank manage user traffic intelligently. Since F5 and ACI technologies are standardized, centric applications are now possible, leading to efficiencies in IT operations. By leveraging the BIG-IP platform’s load balancing capabilities, DBBL was able to redirect inbound traffic, leading to an overall improvement in the speed of transactions. The bank’s employees now enjoy faster page load times and the customers enjoying seamless Internet banking experience.

“Customers appreciate a quality experience and availability. We are now able to respond to queries faster and ensure smoother transactions. Also, we are now confident that we can deliver continuous availability of our services to our customers,” said Mr. Shakil.

Near perfect application uptime

Mr. Shakil said, “With near perfect application uptime, we are able to deliver on our customers’ needs across a wide spectrum of touchpoints and timeframes without loss of service quality. This ability is immensely important to us and highly beneficial to our business.”