Chinese Bank paves cloud migration with DC firewall upgrade

China Construction Bank (CCB), one of China's "big four" banks, has deployed Juniper Networks' security solutions at its three next-generation data centers.

By deploying Juniper Networks' SRX5800 Services Gateways, CCB expects to securely scale its operations support new e-commerce and big data platforms, as well as pave the way for cloud services.

CCB runs nearly 15,000 branches and sub-branches in China and employs about 330,000 staff. The bank provides corporate banking, personal banking, and treasury services. At present, the CCB aims to increase its competitive advantage by focusing on web-based customer services.

300 Gps scalability

Based on Juniper's dynamic services architecture, the SRX5800 is a next-generation security platform that provides CCB with market-leading performance and near-linear scalability up to 300 Gigabits per second of firewall throughput. This level of scalability enables CCB to reduce the number of firewalls deployed in its data centers, simplifying the network while reducing space and power requirements.

According to Juniper's media statement, CCB will benefit from scaling its security in tandem with its robust growth and deliver new online customer services in a cloud environment.

Juniper Networks has been supplying firewalls to CCB since 2005. About 70% of the bank's firewalls deployed within the bank's data centers are currently supplied by Juniper Networks.

CCB has at the end of 2013 started deploying Juniper Networks SRX5800 Services Gateways to replace the previous generation of firewalls at its production data center and two disaster recovery sites.

Cloud migration plan in store

"Juniper Networks' firewalls have been the mainstay of our data center security for several years and we are very confident that the new generation of devices we've deployed will stand up to the ever increasing demands we place upon them," said Xi Mingliang, director, security operation and maintenance, China Construction Bank.

"Financial institutions don't come much bigger than China Construction Bank, which hosts hundreds of millions of customer accounts and process billions of transactions each day. That requires king-sized data centers with equally large-scale security capacity," said Henry Zhu, Greater China Enterprise, Juniper Networks. "We are now in discussion with the bank to ensure that its journey toward cloud computing is just as secure, every step of the way."

"Going forward, we plan to migrate data center operations to a cloud computing architecture and we can already see how Juniper's advanced physical and virtual firewall architecture will be of great benefit," Xi added.