Case Study: First Bank achieves 35% higher application performance and $1 million annual savings with HPE Aruba Networking's EdgeConnect SD‑WAN

First Bank gains 35% higher application performance and saves $1 million annually with the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform

First Bank, a family‑owned financial services firm based in St. Louis with 105 branches and about 900 employees, was constrained by a legacy MPLS/T1 WAN that couldn’t keep up with growing cloud, voice, and backup traffic. The bank needed higher bandwidth and reliable voice failover, predictable application QoS for cloud services, lower network costs, and simpler management and troubleshooting.

First Bank deployed the Aruba EdgeConnect SD‑WAN platform with Aruba Boost and Aruba Orchestrator, replacing MPLS with bonded broadband and LTE backups. The rollout delivered a jump from 3 Mbps to ~200 Mbps (~67×), average application performance up 35%, Boost compression up to 98% for backups, reduced branch deployment time from ~90 days to weeks, seamless voice failover, and an expected $1M annual savings with a 30–40% five‑year ROI.

First Bank

Mark Ashworth

Chief Information Security Officer