Cloud-Delivered Branch Customer Story: Captrust

Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, CAPTRUST, a leading investment services firm, represents more than $340 billion in client assets and has over 40 regional offices across the United States. At these regional offices, financial advisors provide a wide range of investment advisory services to institutional clients and high-net-worth individuals.

With rapid growth, both organic and through acquisitions, CAPTRUST branch offices had increasing bandwidth and security needs. The technology team started the process of upgrading the company’s IT infrastructure. The existing outdated hub-and-spoke Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network was not delivering the user experience needed at the branches. According to CAPTRUST CTO Jon Meyer, “We acquired five to seven businesses a year for a while and those businesses, in turn, had one to five offices. With the MPLS network and the carriers, we struggled to get those people on board quickly enough.”

Video: CAPTRUST CTO Jon Meyer details the company’s partnership with CloudGenix for SD-WAN

The process of setting up a new office would take as long as 120 days. There was little the technology team could do to prevent power outages. Single outages took down sites for entire days. These outages prevented teams from nurturing the client relationships – thereby affecting productivity and eventually client success. Seeking an alternative to their outdated MPLS setup that would increase bandwidth, provide a faster connection and reliable redundancy when launching remote locations, executives and IT managers turned to our Autonomous SD-WAN.

Offering an affordable solution made it easy for CAPTRUST’s technology team to simply plug in a new office’s existing circuit and then configure devices for use. This uniquely simple process instantly made a new site or office a part of the wide-area network as a brand new node. Together, we helped CAPTRUST set up 50 local area networks and integrate it with their main wide area network—a configuration that was not an option with their old MPLS model. Meyer adds, “We selected CloudGenix because we thought the product was ahead of our incumbent suppliers’ capabilities.

Press release: CloudGenix Enables Cloud-Delivered Regional Offices for CAPTRUST

In addition to speeding up the integration of new office sites, we worked with CAPTRUST to deliver reliable, redundant, and affordable bandwidth — a vital component of keeping their employees productive. All business-critical applications, including CRM software and email and voice systems, sit on CloudGenix SD-WAN and outages are happening 90 percent less often than before.

Together we have helped CAPTRUST increase their bandwidth by four times with zero increase in cost. “Without CloudGenix, and without an SD-WAN, our ability to manage our growth and keep people on our network, while having a consistent technology operating model would be diminished,” adds Meyer.

This positive experience in implementing CloudGenix SD-WAN led CAPTRUST to our cloud-delivered security solution based on a zero-trust model, CloudGenix CloudBlades. Now CAPTRUST receives security solutions from the cloud to branch offices leveraging the SD-WAN’s footprint. “In the past, IT would have to compromise between deploying best-of-breed products vs. increasing the number of hardware devices required in the regional offices. With CloudBlades, we can deploy cloud-based security solutions while getting the same impact as if the security solution were physically deployed in the remote office,” says Meyer.

In 2020 and beyond, we will continue to provide customers with the cloud-delivered branch that no longer limits them to legacy hardware routers that force vendor lock-in and quality compromises.

Watch the full CAPTRUST story here.