INB Success Story | Secure and reliable VoIP communications based on Microsoft Office 365

INB was established in 1989 by a consortium of local business people, growing out of a concern that banks headquartered in Spokane were being taken over by large, out-of-state banks. Today, INB has 21 locations in the Spokane area, North Idaho, The Palouse, Columbia Basin, Columbia Gorge and Portland, with total assets of nearly $820 million. As well as offering the convenience of virtual banking, INB provides personal and business banking, commercial and consumer lending, and mortgage and construction lending.

INB had a traditional PBX that had reached its end-of-life and was also operating at full capacity. New employees had to use cell phones for communications, so 4-digit dialing was out of the question for them. This inconvenience and basic incompatibility with the company’s communications system proved detrimental to attracting and retaining high quality staff. Furthermore, since the technology was reliant on an antiquated infrastructure, it was unable to support either employee productivity or customer service at the necessary levels. It soon became clear from an initial inspection that the entire network architecture would need to be refreshed and expanded to support VoIP and to provide better security. It was also obvious that communications functionality should take center stage in any solution.

Cerium Networks was brought in to carry out a thorough and wide-ranging appraisal of all the technical, business and long-term needs of INB’s network infrastructure. Partnering closely with INB, Cerium pinpointed the bank’s business workloads, computing and storage needs, LAN/WAN requirements, failover, fault-tolerance, and business continuity objectives. The appraisal focused primarily on whether INB’s telephony and email applications could be hosted securely in the cloud, and whether ATM and electronic banking services needed to remain private. It also identified which services and workloads could be successfully migrated to Microsoft Azure, and which should stay within the bank’s management domain in primary and secondary data centers.

This detailed appraisal, combined with the consultative and collaborative approach fostered by this partnership, helped INB to decide which solution they should adopt.

Visit the INB website for more information.