Türkiye’s Halkbank finds the right solution stack to perform and scale in tandem
Halkbank, founded in 1993, is one of the largest banks in Türkiye, offering corporate and retail banking, investor relations, and SME and commercial services to over 15 million customers. But during the pandemic lockdowns, customers were forced to switch to the bank’s digital channels, and mobile app users quickly soared from one million to 2.5 million.
Since the pandemic, however, this increase in digital customers hasn’t been entirely smooth. The bank recognized the need to scale its mobile banking platform to handle more than double the volume of traffic.
Namik Kemal Uçkan, head of IT operations at Halkbank, lists challenges created in different areas, including prioritizing network availability when traffic volumes surge; making services in high demand available during peaks; ensuring speedy resolution and identification of network issues; having a sufficient capacity of network monitoring solutions; and ensuring faster incident resolutions and troubleshooting across the networks.
As a result, increasing complexity inside the enterprise IT ecosystem has been constant, and managing networks that support it, while always important, have become critical to address.
Over the last 10 years, Halkbank has been using Riverbed SteelHead across more than 1,000 branches for WAN optimization, and network and application performance. Riverbed’s solutions have helped to ensure Halkbank’s business critical applications are always available for its business users.
“Riverbed SteelHead has been used to accelerate the performance of the internal banking applications that are utilized by its own employees,” says Mena Migally, regional VP, META, at Riverbed. “By deploying this solution, they’ve reduced the latency for applications at branch offices while also realizing bandwidth savings.”
Banking, CIO, Digital Transformation