SD-WAN Use Cases

SD-WAN FOR THE RETAIL INDUSTRY

In articles written online, the inability of retail industries to keep up with technological innovations as a key hindering factor in business growth is most commonly mentioned. This slow-paced progress affects one of the significant roles of retail corporations which is to primarily deliver favorable consumer experience through unified service. Another struggle of these companies is how critical opening new branches could be when it comes to matters such as policy updates and network reconfigurations. This context is exactly why SD-WAN must be considered an ideal and essential solution for the retail industry.

HOME IMPROVEMENT RETAIL STORE

THE PROBLEM

A home improvement retail store in the U.S. has a T1 line with 1.5 Mbps bandwidth for each of its stores. It needed help in increasing its bandwidth for the approximate 130 dispersed branches across United States hence shares its experience on how SD-WAN became one of the best solution providers for the company.

In order to deliver a state-of-the art technology that shall offer a modernistic experience to its clients, the said retail company introduced the Design Studio. It is a web-based tool that allows clients to virtually choose tile designs and even decorate a room. However, such an advanced tool needed enough bandwidth on both the sales executive’s and consumer’s ends.

SD-WAN AS THE SOLUTION

To solve this issue, increasing the provided MPLS circuit was considered but it is proven to be more expensive. Local DSL providers can also be tapped for additional bandwidth but whether it’s sufficient or not was what was initially questionable.

These factors led the company to the SD-WAN technology which enabled the aggregation of their T1 and broadband lines resulting to 50 to 100 Mbps available bandwidth from the previous 1.5 Mbps. The company also particularly hold the solution in high esteem as it is easy to monitor and helped them save on bandwidth cost giving them around 16-20 months of guaranteed return on investment upon installation.

UTILIZING SD-WAN TO PROVIDE THE BEST SERVICES AS A LEAD COMPETITOR IN THE FUEL INDUSTRY

THE PROBLEM

In a time wherein evolution and industrialization are rapidly taking place, the growing demand for the likes of fuel and petroleum has now become inevitable. Therefore, the pressure to essentially give sufficient supply of these renewable goods has been the burden of the suppliers and distributors alike. Hence, corporations involved in the distribution of fuel are faced with the challenge of increasing visibility thus leading them to consistently opening remote offices across the nation.

A retail company and one of the top players in the Philippine fuel industry is faced with a similar challenge. In order to cope up with the bandwidth requirement of their approximate 75 stations across the nation, they had to increase their bandwidth. Since the company is using an MPLS line, adding more of these was considered an option however, realizing that it would be too expensive urged them to think of a better and more cost-efficient solution.

SD-WAN AS THE SOLUTION

In order to see if the company would like how the solution could decrease bandwidth cost but significantly increase WAN, we initially deployed 2 units of SD-WAN. Since it has the ability to bond multiple WAN connections (MPLS, broadband internet, satellite, 4G, LTE) to create a single, secure, logical link, it then allowed the increase of WAN throughput and the creation of network resiliency. This logical connection guarantees the reliability of critical application traffic and allows the automatic re-routing of application traffic at packet level, which ensures a constant bandwidth throughput independent of network fluctuations and bandwidth availability. Given this, through the combination of the existing MPLS line, SDWAN appliance, and additional broadband connection, spending less for an increased bandwidth was made possible. The company’s positive experience with regards to the product encouraged them to add 10 more units to their other remote offices only a few months following the beginning of the project.

SD-WAN FOR THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY

Banks and/or Insurance agencies or corporations are always faced with the challenge of meeting the demand of the people especially that money is essential to acquire one’s basic needs to survive. Not everyone has sufficient funds to afford his daily necessities the same way that some people are fortunate enough to maintain numerous accounts and entrust their hard-earned money to their desired bank’s safekeeping. These varying contexts prove why there is a need for corporations in the financial services industry to have multiple branches in order to remain competent in the market and the same reason why they are in need of a solution that can help them keep their position in the ever growing and competitive industry.

A BANKING AND INSURANCE CORPORATION TAKES THE LEAD WITH SD-WAN

PROBLEM

A bank in the United States that has multiple branches and ATM sites needed to monitor and control its network performance, enable redundant connections, and still ensuring data encryption due to the company’s cloud migration. These features were needed alongside an infrastructure that is both cost-saving and cost-effective.

SD-WAN AS THE SOLUTION

Given that the company had to cater to numerous remote provinces across the nation, slow connection and difficulty to access hampered in their desired quality of service likewise in plans of adding more to these remotely located sites. However, with the help of SD-WAN, they were able to increase their connection while only using the branches’ available broadband while maintaining data security as the financial data is stored in the data center and the appliance has readily-available or built-in firewall capabilities.

SD-WAN FOR THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

AN INTERNATIONAL HEALTHCARE PROVIDER MAXIMIZES THE USE OF SD-WAN TO EFFECTIVELY PROVIDE WORLD-CLASS SERVICE TO ITS PATIENTS

PROBLEM

An acclaimed healthcare group that was established for nursing and rehabilitation with 120 facilities and over 10,000 residents wanted to let patients have access to their doctors in a virtual environment. This setup would allow patients to avoid long hours of travel just for check-ups and diagnosis and even aid remote doctors assess their patients even in the comfort of the latter’s home. However, these would only be made possible if they have a reasonably huge bandwidth with limited downtime.

SD-WAN AS THE SOLUTION

As SD-WAN was introduced to the aforementioned healthcare group, they realized that it was actually possible to no longer have the need to add another costly MPLS line just to increase their bandwidth. Since the solution could create an aggregated tunnel, it increased their bandwidth and enabled and active-active connection which significantly avoided their downtime, helped them manage and gave them visibility over their network. These features of the SD-WAN solution enabled them to properly deliver the application or virtual environment they wanted both their doctors and especially patients to benefit from.