Case Study: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) achieves secure, instant-on portable wireless access and rapid, scalable field deployments with HPE Aruba Networking

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation banks on Aruba for portable wireless network access

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) faced a sudden surge in on-site inspections and bank transitions after the 2008 banking crisis, requiring large numbers of compliance and assumption teams to deploy nationwide. Its legacy model—costly dedicated circuits and VPNs—was labor-intensive, hard to scale, and didn’t meet the FDIC’s need for secure, portable, instant connectivity for laptops and PDAs at staging areas and bank sites.

The FDIC deployed Aruba fly-away wireless kits—preconfigured Aruba 800 Mobility Controllers with AP-70/AP-85 access points and software (mesh, ARM, site-to-site tunneling, and per-user policy enforcement)—managed centrally from the FDIC data center. The plug-and-play solution provided end-to-end security, rapid “instant on” setup, federal compliance, and lower TCO, enabling the agency to scale quickly (supporting many teams and up to ~100 members per deployment), cut activation time from days to minutes, and reduce costs.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)