Case study · Fintech · 140 employees
1,000+ hours saved a year with fewer connectivity issues
A regulated fintech replaced its hardware VPN and branch-office backhaul with OpenVLAN — cutting support load and passing its next audit faster.
A regulated fintech replaced its hardware VPN and branch-office backhaul with OpenVLAN — cutting support load and passing its next audit faster.
Two concentrators, 140 staff, and a failure mode everyone could recite: at 9:05 the gateways saturated, connections queued, and the ticket count climbed until lunch. The dashboard below is the "before" the infrastructure team screenshotted for their own post-mortem.
The change auditors noticed first wasn't the network — it was the evidence. Access reviews that once required a week of screenshot assembly became a single command, because every session already carried an identity, a device, and a timestamp.
Northwind ran a pair of VPN concentrators across two offices, with every remote employee backhauling through whichever gateway had capacity. Peak mornings meant queueing; quarter-end meant tickets. The two-person infrastructure team spent the equivalent of a full workday each week on connectivity triage — resets, reconnects, and explaining split-tunneling to auditors.
They connected OpenVLAN to their existing identity provider so access rules inherited the same groups IT already maintained. A pilot of ten engineers ran for two weeks alongside the old VPN. Rollout to all 140 staff finished inside a month, and the concentrators were decommissioned the following quarter.
Connectivity tickets dropped so far that the infrastructure team rebuilt their support dashboard around it: roughly 1,000+ staff-hours per year returned to actual work. Audit prep, previously a scramble of screenshots and firewall exports, became a log export. And employees stopped noticing the network — which is the point.
staff-hours saved per year
VPN concentrators decommissioned
from pilot to full migration
"The network stopped being a topic in our standup. I didn't realize how much of my week it was eating until it was gone."
— Infrastructure lead, Northwind Financial
Northwind is now moving database maintenance windows onto scoped, expiring privileged sessions — the same identity model, applied to their most sensitive systems.
This case study is an illustrative example with fictional data for demonstration purposes.