BNP Paribas picks OBS to co-construct SD-WAN for 1,800 French retail sites

Orange Business Services says the joint design and deployment is to ensure business continuity during deployment.

BNP Paribas has chosen Orange Business Services to deploy an SD-WAN solution in more than 1,800 bank branches across France.

BNP apparently is dedicated to developing and integrating new digital solutions for customers and employees alike, and reckons that the Flexible SD-WAN service provided by Orange will act as a tech platform to speed digitalisation.

Right path

The rationale is that it enables quick and easy deployment of multiple services, such as dynamic routing and path selection, at scale.

Administrators can monitor infrastructure performance and resolve potential network congestion through “simple” software modifications, Orange says, thereby optimising applications’ performance.

The SD-WAN also means BNP Paribas can take advantage of a secure hybrid network that is natively multi-cloud, multi-access and multi-application.

The bank will also benefit from optimised and centralised management and intelligent routing for its new infrastructure.

Design and deploy

From the start, Orange Business Services and BNP Paribas designed the solution together, prioritising which features to deploy. More than 3,600 access lines – two per branch, including one Internet access line – are being rolled out while maintaining business continuity for each site during the migration.

In addition to the SD-WAN overlay, firewalls for better security are part of deployment.
 
Bernard Gavgani, CIO at BNP Paribas Group, said, “It was paramount for us to choose a partner who already had proven experience implementing and operating SD-WAN solutions. Orange Business Services stood out as this trusted partner.

“In addition to their IT expertise, the Orange teams demonstrated a great ability to understand our business challenges, and they knew what needed to be done to support our end-to-end digital transformation.

“This close collaboration between our teams from the very beginning of the project was one of the keys to its success and to a smooth roll out”.