Intelligence network tracks HSBC IT assets

Banking giant HSBC has announced plans to install intelligent networking technology at two data centres in India.

Its decision builds on a seven-year project at the bank’s wealth management division in St James’s Street in London and at its 44-storey headquarters in Canary Wharf that helped transform the way the company tackles IT faults and repairs.

Roy Culligan, senior manager of group IT at HSBC, says the bank has used the intelligent infrastructure management system from iTracs to dramatically improve how it deals with the 8,000 employee desk moves that it conducts each year.

‘We used to have a small army of people that went around trying to understand what people required. Every member of staff has at least one PC and a telephone port, and many have more devices,’ said Culligan.

‘But technicians do not like documentation. They like carrying out the work and meeting expectations. But to go back to their desk and do the admin is low on their agenda.’

When HSBC moved staff from 14 offices in the City of London to the Canary Wharf HSBC Tower in 2002, the bank decided it needed a more intelligent approach to tracking its IT assets and network capability.

To track the IT assets, which are connected to 160,000 network ports and are used by more than 9,000 employees, the bank installed iTracs software to discover, map and manage connectivity of all devices, on every floor.

‘In the past, before an office move we would have to interview the department to be moved and complete a full survey of what devices they wanted to move. We would then need to do the same at the location they were moving to,’ said Culligan.

Using the iTracs software, IT professionals can access all the information they need without having to leave their desks. It has also enabled them to reduce the number of technicians working on office relocations from 20 people to five.

A move that used to take at least a month to plan can now be completed within a fortnight.

The system is also being used to speed up detection of network problems. If a network connection has been disconnected or a device misconfigured, the fault can be detected within minutes rather than hours, says Culligan.

‘We can locate a Mac or IP address within five metres, which is pretty important when we have 1.1million square feet of office space to search,’ he said.

Since installing the iTracs systems HSBC has made significant cost savings and has reduced downtime. It has also enabled better management of its inventory of IT assets.

In the future, the bank could also add a number of extra security features that would allow it to build on rogue device detection functionalities and pinpoint its exact location.

On the move

*HSBC has installed network management software onall 44 floors of its Canary Wharf tower.

*The software helps manage 8,000 desk moves a year.

*It detects some 160,000 network ports used by more than 9,000 employees.

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