Customer

The client is a large UK based financial company, which acquired Insurance companies in Japan and has a large presence in Japan. Currently they have 4 offices in Tokyo business district and 10 branch offices outside. The number of branch offices is expected to increase to fifty in the near future. There is also a Main Frame system in the Data Center. In addition, the client is going to have Web based advisory systems for agents and clients for which they would have an IDC with a Business Continuity site. It was decided that for seamless connectivity of the employees, agents and clients they need a solution, which would integrate everyone. We have proposed an MPLS Based VPN with IPSEC tunnel access for Branches, Metro Ether connection for Tokyo CBD offices and IPSEC based remote access VPN for agents and mobile employees.

Challenge

The challenges to the solution lie in running IPSec VPN above the MPLS VPN client. There are multiple paths to two main sites. Customer wants to reroute VPN traffic via another IPSEC tunnel in case the primary link fails. The customer wants a smooth failover so that it seems very transparent to the end users and there is no connection failure.

Solution

Initially, all the branches of the client were connected using 64K Frame Relay links. The client needed to upgrade the speed. Wipro offered a MPLS VPN based solution, as it is a very cost-effective solution compared to leased or Frame circuit. All the customer needed to do was to take only the local circuit to the service provider and share the Service Provider’s gigabit backbone. Using multi protocol BGP customer routes are propagated to the other sites. In addition to this, multiple IPSec tunnels have been configured for encryption.

The customer Head Quarters, Branches, Internet Data Center and the business continuity sites are connected via the MPLS VPN. All the mobile users are connected using Cisco VPN concentrators. The Mobile users dial into the nearest ISP and connect via Internet to access the Intranet sites. The entire solution is based on Cisco products. Their Head Quarter is connected to other offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, UK etc via another VPN based solution from Checkpoint.

Benefits