May 30, 2023
“Now we look at the map or dashboard built on SolarWinds, and we know the problem is here. We need to look at this part of the network, at this device, at this link, and we do not spend precious minutes or hours diagnosing. Nowadays, I don’t have hours to understand what’s going on.” Guido Doberti, Banco Galicia, IT Manager
About Banco Galicia
Founded in 1905, Banco de Galicia y Buenos Aires SAU is one of the leading private banks in the Argentine financial system and the leading private sector bank. As a universal bank, Banco Galicia offers a wide range of financial services through different related companies and various distribution channels. The bank currently serves 3.5 million customers and has a strong digital presence in the Argentinian market, with almost 2.2 million monthly active users on its digital platforms.
Challenge
Banco Galicia started their technology transformation over five years ago—a transformation accelerated by COVID-19. Banco Galicia needed to act quickly to ensure their network and systems were prepared to handle the increase in online transactions. As a result of the digital trend, most of the bank’s transactions are now digital. The bank’s digital operations are a critical component of everyday customer support. Quick responses and load times for their app and reliable system availability are crucial.
With technological advances comes a higher risk of a cybersecurity incident or a network slowdown. Guido Doberti, IT manager, states, “To the bank, operational security is a major concern. Within IT, one of the biggest challenges is keeping up with the speed you need to deliver your products. We must be fast—fast enough to satisfy the needs of our customers and all our business units.”
Doberti says the organization’s approach to its services has adapted to the changing industry landscape and fintech competition.
Banco Galicia invested in a microservices-based private cloud development platform to foster innovation. Running on Red Hat® OpenShift®, the environment has grown to over 250 projects and 15,000 containers. A fully automated process, this has transformed the time needed to push code to production from days to a couple of hours.
“Before SolarWinds, network alarms were not precise or accurate. And once you lose trust in your monitoring systems, your whole operational practice breaks down.”
Alongside this private cloud platform, the bank uses a mix of software-as-a-service solutions and services from public cloud service providers. Since the public and private cloud services are interconnected—for example, the image registry for on-premises OpenShift runs on Azure®—Doberti says, “Connectivity is a huge deal for us.” External internet connectivity is equally critical to the bank, where due to current market conditions, funds transfers and other transactions need to complete within seconds.
Today, Banco Galicia looks at their offerings as banking as a service. It falls on Doberti and his team to ensure these critical network and digital services are always running smoothly and performing at a high level.
Solution
Doberti and his team needed a comprehensive solution to address the challenges of monitoring and managing critical connectivity. They kept three key considerations in mind when researching solutions:
- A proven solution in the market with good customer reviews and a track record of a good customer experience
- A single solution for their hybrid environment to consolidate their existing tools
- A solid, proven, and comprehensive solution to manage the network
Some of his team members were already familiar with SolarWinds. After reading reviews, his team tried several free trials and ran tests to see if SolarWinds offered a viable solution. They found their tests backed up what user reviews said: SolarWinds delivers easy-to-use, dependable solutions.
“We have a lot more time to focus on engineering and deployment activities, and we are not running behind the incidents.”
Doberti and his team chose SolarWinds to provide the network monitoring they require and the simplicity of use the team needs to be successful. The key benefit here was simplicity. Doberti and his team wanted something to allow them to quickly identify devices and give them an always-on, detailed view of their environment. SolarWinds has helped them create a monitoring solution that “just works” and provides the data and information necessary to attack projects and issues proactively to increase the uptime, speed, and services for the bank.
“Since we implemented SolarWinds, we have a clear and deep understanding of how every device and every connection we have on our network is performing,” Doberti says. “We can anticipate incidents with huge impact because we get an alert about the diminishment in performance or the health of every device.”
“We can act faster and make decisions before an incident escalates. We have alerts when one of the links with an ISP is not performing well. We can take it out of production and maintain the service level for our customers.”
Product Mix
- SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor
- SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer
- SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager
- SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper
