Movement Mortgage: On the Move

Movement Mortgage is moving fast in the world of financial services. The mortgage provider, founded in 2008, has grown from four employees to more than 3,800 in 47 states today. It is currently the fastest-growing mortgage bank in the U.S., according to Inc. Magazine.

The company’s 30-person IT staff, though, struggled to support that kind of business success. “With such a small team to support thousands of employees, we needed a way to provide central management and fast deployment of mobile devices and other solutions,” says Cam Lawler, the company’s enterprise applications director. “That was difficult for us, considering we had an aging networking infrastructure.” Movement Mortgage also required a better wireless network for its increasingly mobile workers.

Finally, Movement Mortgage needed to reduce the potential for network attacks in order to protect its customers’ financial data. “We had disparate networks without a unified security policy, and our hardware did not have the configuration and performance we needed to deliver next-generation security,” Lawler says.

Bolstering Security and Optimizing the Network with Dell Technologies

The company considered different wired and wireless networking and security solutions before choosing to deploy an end-to-end Dell EMC and Intel® solution. The solution includes Dell EMC Networking N2048 switches at the company’s four operation centers in South Carolina, Arizona and Virginia. “With the stacking capabilities in the Dell EMC Networking N0248 switches, we are able to manage a large network with as few spanning tree nodes as possible,” says Lawler. Movement Mortgage also deployed Aerohive AP230 access points at all four offices, an operations center and a sales support center, with HiveManager NG for centralized network management. The organization set up separate access and policies for employees and guests.

The company’s South Carolina national sales support center also includes Dell EMC Networking X-Series smart managed switches as distribution switches to tie in its main and intermediate distribution frames using 10GbE fiber. With the Dell EMC Networking X-Series switches, the company’s network administrators have simplified management through tools such as wizards and a configurable dashboard that provides detailed visibility into the network. The company also uses the solution’s real-time analytics features to monitor and optimize traffic.

“By getting all of our locations across 47 states under a consolidated single wide-area network using Dell EMC Networking, Aerohive and SonicWall technologies, I know where traffic originates. In case of a malicious attack, I can more easily pinpoint it, shut it down and lock it out.”

— Cam Lawler, Enterprise Applications Director, Movement Mortgage

Movement Mortgage addressed its security requirements by implementing more than 300 SonicWall NSA series firewalls across all locations with centralized firewall management provided by the SonicWall Global Management System (GMS). The firm packages its SonicWall and Aerohive technologies as part of a branch-in-a-box solution for smaller branch offices. “Each branch gets a SonicWall firewall, interior domain and an Aerohive solution,” says Lawler. Each branch-in-a-box also includes Dell EMC Networking X-Series smart managed switches.

Additionally, the company installed more than 3,900 Dell OptiPlex desktops, Dell tablets, and Dell Latitude laptops—connected using Wi-Fi 802.11ac and 1GbE Ethernet—at its primary offices, with Dell ProSupport Plus for technical support on these solutions. Movement Mortgage also uses Dell EMC PowerEdge R430 servers with Intel® Xeon® processors, as well as Boomi AtomSphere software to connect on-premises applications running in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The servers also support virtual machines, local domain control, virus scan and malware updates.

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