Opengear (www.opengear.com), a leading provider of critical infrastructure management solutions through advanced console servers, remote management, monitoring, and cellular out-of-band products, today announced that Turkish banking group, Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası, has deployed Opengear’s Remote Management Gateways at Bank’s branch office sites with plans to roll out Opengear technology to a further 145 sites including several critical data centre locations.
Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası has 250 branches and approximately 4000 staff serving over 1 million customers across Turkey and internationally. The bank has a proactive attitude to protecting its IT systems and decided it needed to improve remote connectivity to critical infrastructure in branch locations, to help detect and resolve issues.
The bank turned for advice to CTS Bilisim, an Istanbul based expert in data centre and server room monitoring and management technology. Following a thorough evaluation process of competing solutions, Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası selected the Opengear ACM5500 Remote Management Gateway to enable secure remote monitoring, access and control of its distributed network infrastructure and remote sites using its built-in out-of-band connectivity.
According to Erdal Ek, Senior Network Specialist for Türkiye Finans, “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.” Erdal Ek highlights built-in remote site access including PSTN and cellular, and the ease with which remote admins can upload managed device configuration and operating system images from Opengear’s internal flash drive for remote bare-metal provisioning and repair of critical systems.
The bank has installed Opengear at branches across the country and Erdal Ek confirms that the out-of-band solution has improved the IT departments’ ability to both manage and configure remote devices during installation or if a problem arises. “Opengear saves us time and allows us to quickly understand and resolve a wide range of problems and ultimately increase customer satisfaction,” Erdal Ek adds.
Working closely with CTS Bilisim, an Opengear partner, the bank is upgrading each branch 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, to ensure rigid security compliance around sensitive financial transactions. For its high-density data centre environments, the bank has specified the Opengear IM series Infrastructure Managers offering up to 48 console connections in a single rack unit.
Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası plans to complete roll out to an additional 145 sites during 2014.
About CTS BILISIM LTD. Co.
CTS BILISIM was founded in 2010 with experienced and dynamic team to serve IT market as a distributor company. CTS BILISIM targets to analyse the needs in Turkish market, to offer efficient solutions, to give priority to customer satisfaction and to develop a system which can supply the adaptation of CTS BILISIM to a rapidly growing market.
About Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası
A joint venture of the Boydak Group, the Ülker Group, and The National Commercial Bank (Saudi Arabia), Türkiye Finans is grounded Turkey’s deep-rooted knowledge of and experience with participation banking.
Türkiye Finans Katılım Bankası was founded following the merger of the companies Family Finans and Anadolu Finans, which belongs to the Boydak and Ülker Groups, two leading large groups in Turkey, in 2005.
A new period of tremendous change and transformation at Türkiye Finans began on 31 March 2008 when The National Commercial Bank (NCB) acquired a 60% stake in the company. By bringing together the strengths of the Boydak and Ülker groups, two of Turkey’s leading industrial conglomerates, with those of the Middle East’s most deeply-capitalized bank, capital structure and vision of this partnership resulted in its emergence as a leading player in the business of participation banking.
In 2011 Türkiye Finans laid out a five-year plan under which it redefined its goals and growth roadmap. As called for in that plan, the bank is currently undertaking a variety of projects and making important progress aimed at further developing its technological infrastructure, business processes and service approach.
As of end-2013 Türkiye Finans was the hub of a powerful service platform consisting of over 4,000 employees, over 250 branches, and an effective array of alternative delivery channels that enables the bank to offer innovative and high added value products, services, and solutions to a broad customer base in the corporate & commercial banking, enterprise banking, and retail banking segments.
