Scaling Your Network to Accommodate 2000+ Remote Sites? VMware SD-WAN is Money in the Bank

Quickly scaling networks as your company grows can pose a challenge to internal IT teams. And when your company is adding new locations daily across countries, the task is that much more formidable.

Grupo Bancolombia is the largest bank in Colombia, with 20,000 employees and more than 20 million customers spread across the country and throughout Central America and the Caribbean. Bancolombia has more than 640 branches and 1200 ATMs to service its clients, and the number continues to multiply. Prior attempts to effectively integrate Bancolombia’s expanding network of locations were costly, time-consuming, and minimally effective.

The company began looking for new solutions that could address several issues. First, they needed to bring new facilities online and upgrade existing facilities with little or no delay and at a lower cost than prior processes. They also wanted to be able to easily add new services for both their banking customers and their staff. And whatever solution they chose had to give them effective control of system security so that they could meet regulatory compliance requirements.

With its design specs in hand, Bancolombia turned to VMware SD-WAN™ as the solution.

Bringing new locations online quickly and inexpensively

“VMware gave us peace of mind during testing phase as the VMware SD-WAN solution proved to be the reliable solution we were seeking, thanks to VMware’s superior architecture and technology.”

Angel David Niebles, Leader of Branches and ATMs Connectivity Area of Telecommunications Management, Bancolombia

Realizing the limitations of its existing processes for adding expensive and limited capacity MPLS lines for each new installation, Bancolombia’s Telecommunications Group began to analyze alternatives. After extensive research that included validation and proof of concept exercises, they concluded that VMware SD-WAN was the best option for reliably scaling their bandwidth without needing complex implementations.

Bancolombia’s experience with putting SD-WAN in place has more than validated their decision. Using SD-WAN, the company switched to Internet connectivity, enabling it to scale its operations by a factor of 10. They can now bring new branches and ATMs online in hours rather than months, making future growth that much simpler.

Bancolombia was also very satisfied with the speed of SD-WAN implementation. Integrating nearly 700 branches with SD-WAN took just over four months. Bank executives note that this was a record for putting a project of this magnitude in place.

The bank replaced old limited-capacity MPLS architectures. With SD-WAN they were able to switch to Internet links, growing capacity by 10x and keeping some parallel MPLS connections, which helped optimize costs and increase bandwidth. This helped build bandwidth quickly, allowed the company to bring new locations up with minimal effort and time, and reduced the costs of scaling substantially. Bancolombia now estimates that it will achieve a 20% cost savings for branch and ATM maintenance within the next two years.

Improving the customer experience

Naturally, giving banking customers more options for accessing their financial information and services, and doing so in record time, considerably improves their experience and builds brand loyalty for Bancolombia. According to recent statistics, 62% prefer to manage their investments with an app.

And with centralized management and automation, they are able to monitor performance better and provide improved service quality across all existing links, making the customer experience that much more smooth and more reliable.

But the company was not just focused on the experience of its external users; it also wanted to improve the experience of its internal customers, namely its employees. After implementing VMware SD-WAN, Bancolombia was able to streamline workflows for employees, allowing them greater control over their everyday work routines.

Meeting security and regulatory needs

As a financial institution, Bancolombia has rigorous compliance obligations. And Bancolombia knew that VMware SD-WAN would help them meet all their compliance and security needs.

One feature that Bancolombia relies on heavily is the ability to segment traffic. Segmentation is an important part of Bancolombia’s cybersecurity program as it helps reduce the company’s attack surface while ensuring that all traffic reaches its desired endpoint.

“SD-WAN allows us to segment the different traffic and encrypt each separately, making it easier to transport to any of the data centers, knowing the type of information and traffic that is running.”

Angel David Niebles, Leader of Branches and ATMs Connectivity Area of Telecommunications Management, Bancolombia

Bancolombia also trusts SD-WAN’s built-in AES 256 encryption for data links to protect its most sensitive data. With SD-WAN encryption, Bancolombia can be sure of meeting standards set by the Colombian Financial Superintendence, as well as the range of strong data protection laws and standards in force in Colombia.

The results speak for themselves

Bancolombia’s executives have met their goals and are excitedly looking to continuous improvement of services, with SD-WAN as a central part of their development strategy. They have become more agile, increased their ability to scale to meet customer demand, and ensured that all of their systems meet the stringent requirements of Colombia’s regulatory agencies. But this is just the beginning of their journey with VMware SD-WAN.

“We believe that we can continue to evolve SD-WAN, with new capabilities and protocols that we can integrate, like SASE—that we are already starting to analyze from our telecommunications research area. In the future, we want to continue exploring and leveraging investment in these types of technologies. In that sense, VMware is a great partner.”

Angel David Niebles, Leader of Branches and ATMs Connectivity Area of Telecommunications Management, Bancolombia

To read more about how VMware helped Grupo Bancolombia build out its network of branches and customer access points at high speed and low cost, read the full case study and watch the video here.