Re-inventing the network of a major health technology company

Overview

When it comes to improving the lives of people around the world, innovation, and the speed and accuracy in which new services are developed, is critical.

To be at the forefront of health technology, our customer depends on their teams being able to collaborate and work productively, no matter where they are, without disruption or delay.

The challenge

They wanted a digital network that enabled their workforce to work securely from anywhere at any time. Usage of their existing network was growing 30% every year and they needed to find a way to balance demand with increasing pressure to cut costs. Not an easy ask.

They were on a significant cloud transformation journey and needed their network to support the increasing use of cloud-based applications and tooling. They also needed to be able to manage the network centrally, taking the pressure off their team and improving agility.

The solution

Working together on a pioneering technology rollout

To solve the challenge, we delivered a network strategy consisting of five key components:

• SD-WAN for the delivery of enterprise services over WAN based on SDN
• SD-LAN for secure, high performance with a single pane intelligent monitoring for onsite networking
• co-location hubs to create virtual data centres that interconnect cloud regions, third parties, and the organisation’s network
• remote access VPN
• unified communications.

Our Agile Connect Platform powered by Nuage Networks from Nokia provided our customer with a single integrated solution and support interface for centralised management, increasing simplicity and reducing cost.

As SD-WAN technology was still at an early stage and our customer was one of its pioneering users, they really valued our experience and expertise. They also appreciated being able to take a co-innovative and risk-sharing approach during deployment.

The result 

Enhancing user experiences, with lower costs

The customer is now seeing the benefits that they’d hoped for when they created the business case back in 2017.

The organisation now has:

• an integrated solution to replace expensive MPLS with an overlay network using low-cost internet connections
• a pure service with no upfront hardware investments
• a 45%+ reduction in cost
• an 80%+ improvement in latency
• a 200%+ increase in bandwidth
• a cloud-native network
• an architecture designed with automation in mind to reduce human error.