SBI Connect

By Smitha

Company

The history of SBI can be traced back to the Bank of Calcutta, which started

its operations on 2^nd June 1806. State Bank of India was in its

present form constituted on the 1^st July 1955.

SBI, India’s largest commercial bank and one of the top five banks

worldwide has more than 90 million customers. SBI today has over 9000 branches

and 2065 ATMs spread across the length and breadth of the country. 

The Challenge

When the Banking sector was opened up, the public sector banks faced sudden

competition from private and foreign banks, which started to use technology to

provide better customer service. This brought about a revolution in the banking

segment. Public Sector banks had no go but to face the competition head-on by

realigning their process and embracing IT in a big way.

To meet up with the emerging new challenges and maintain its lead position as

the primary bank in the country, SBI turned to IT in a large way. It wanted to

integrate its channels as well as roll out a nationwide network called the SBI

connect. SBI Connect was aimed at creating a networked bank, which would give

customers a seamless flow of transactions. The network would streamline data

gathering and dissemination, and would support an integrated view of products

across all channels.

The Chosen Solution

SBI was looking for a solution that would create a nationwide backbone

network, initially linking 1,500 SBI branches and 3,000 ATMs across 51 cities.

The bank was looking for a network integrator, who would build and manage the

network.

It was looking for a robust and scalable network that could carry all present

and future traffic, including transactions, ATM, IP voice, groupware, Intranet

and other applications. The bank also had a requirement for separate

videoconferencing links. After due diligence of a number of vendors, The State

Bank of India selected Datacraft Asia to build and manage a nationwide backbone

network.

The solution selected implementation of a three-tier corporate WAN which, in

its first phase, was to link 51 cities. Datacraft was also responsible for

systems survey, network design, implementation, management and also training.

The solution designed by Datacraft was a self-healing ring on a hub and spoke

model, with a centralized data center in Mumbai and a back-up in Delhi.

It has three tiers of access — a core linking the country's four main

cities, a distribution network linking local head offices and zonal offices back

to the core metro cities, and an access network to the end branches. Each core

metro city was configured as an OSPF autonomous system and was "glued"

to the other cities using the BGP protocol.

This not only ensured scalability but enabled the bank to connect associates

and other third parties without large-scale changes to the network topology or

design. The security issue was addressed by the use of encryption to IPSeC

standards for banking traffic from the end branches. 

Significant advantages

Thanks to the 24/7 help desk provided by Datacraft SBI can without any issues

manage scheduled and unscheduled network outages from a central point.

Datacraft's training services were used to train the bank's engineers in both

basic and advanced networking concepts. This helped the company quickly deploy

the solution as well as prepare and educate its employees to the change.