Aldermore: CloudVision + AVD: Driving Automation, Visibility, and a Future-Ready Network
Client Summary
Founded in 2009, Aldermore Bank is a UK-based challenger bank and subsidiary of FirstRand Group, one of South Africa’s largest financial institutions. The bank has grown rapidly by focusing on specialist lending and savings products designed for small and medium-sized businesses, homeowners, landlords, and motor finance customers through its MotoNovo Finance division.
As a growing digital-first bank, Aldermore’s success depends on its ability to provide reliable, secure, and agile connectivity across its nationwide network, supporting everything from customer-facing financial services to the data-driven systems used for risk, compliance, and transaction operations.
With growth accelerating and new demands emerging across its hybrid workforce, Aldermore sought to modernize its network foundation and establish a platform capable of supporting the next generation of banking services.
The Challenge
As Aldermore continued to grow, its network environment had evolved across multiple vendors, architectures, and management tools. While this approach supported the bank’s growth, it also introduced an opportunity to simplify operations, increase consistency, and create a stronger foundation for automation, visibility, and faster change delivery.
As Aldermore brought more IT operations in-house, the internal team needed a network environment that was simpler to manage, easier to scale, and designed for automation from day one.
Data Center Consolidation
Aldermore operates eight data centers across the UK supporting Aldermore Bank and MotoNovo. A key deliverable of this program is the creation of a standardized, group-wide shared infrastructure consolidated into two strategic data center locations.
At the same time, a series of high-priority outages reinforced the urgency of change. The bank needed to:
- Eliminate complexity by unifying data center and campus architectures under a single, modern design
- Reduce operational risk through automation, visibility, and centralized management
- Enable scalability and agility for a hybrid workforce and evolving digital banking services
- Build in resilience and security that met the compliance expectations of a regulated financial institution
HighPoint have been a strong and reliable partner to Aldermore, providing high‑quality technical expertise and professional services across a range of network, security and data centre initiatives. Their team consistently demonstrate a solid understanding of our environment, engage proactively, and deliver with a level of rigour and transparency that we value as a financial services organization.
Shaun McLaughlin
Head of Network
The Approach
HighPoint partnered with Aldermore to design a next-generation network architecture built on Arista Networks technology, laying the groundwork for automation, programmability, and cloud-scale efficiency.
Reference Architecture Workshop
As part of the engagement, HighPoint facilitated a structured reference architecture workshop with Aldermore’s stakeholders to map the current and future-state architecture, build a modernization roadmap, and establish prioritization for delivery.
Foundation: Arista Spine-Leaf Fabric
HighPoint implemented a standardized spine-leaf architecture across data centers and four key campus sites, establishing a single operating environment for both core and edge connectivity.
Automation & Visibility: CloudVision + Arista Validated Designs
Leveraging Arista CloudVision and AVD (Architect, Validate, Deploy), HighPoint enabled structured, version-controlled configurations, zero-touch provisioning, and repeatable deployment models that support configuration consistency, deployment accuracy, and operational scale.
Secure Access & Assurance
The design incorporates Arista AGNI for access control (replacing Cisco ISE) and Arista CloudTest to create a digital twin environment for pre-production validation, providing Aldermore with new dimensions of operational visibility and assurance.
Knowledge Transfer & Enablement
For the first time, Aldermore’s engineers are being enabled to deploy, test, and operate the environment in-house, supported by hands-on sessions and direct collaboration with HighPoint’s architecture and delivery teams.
The Result
Aldermore’s new network foundation is already delivering increased consistency, simplicity, and operational capability, with full rollout continuing through 2026.
Unified Architecture: Consistent design and management across the data center and campus estate, streamlining management across a previously multi-vendor environment
Improved Reliability:
Single-OS operation and predictive testing help support availability, service continuity, and proactive validation
Automation-Ready Foundation: Structured, repeatable configurations and version-controlled deployments establish the groundwork for full programmability
Operational Empowerment: Aldermore’s in-house teams are equipped with modern tools and training to manage and evolve the platform
Enhanced Visibility & Control: CloudVision provides real-time telemetry and centralized policy management
Security & Compliance: Integrated access control, segmentation readiness, and continuous validation support regulated financial services requirements
Whats Next
With a new fabric in place, Aldermore are evaluating the expansion of the modernization roadmap to include:
Micro-Segmentation & NDR: Assessing Arista’s MSS and NDR platforms for enhanced visibility and threat detection
Zero-Trust Network Expansion: Reviewing policy-driven access and segmentation strategies to strengthen security posture
Operational Automation:
Exploring expanded automation capabilities, including zero-touch provisioning and Infrastructure as code (IaC) operations at scale
