Edge to Cloud with SD-WAN

Nuffield Health installed SD-WAN at 189 sites in just four months. On average, it connected 15 sites per week, which peaked at 27 sites in one week. The Aruba Orchestrator management console – included with the EdgeConnect platform – and zero-touch provisioning enabled this fast SD-WAN deployment.

Since deploying the Aruba SD-WAN solution, In Extenso no longer experiences dropped or degraded VoIP calls, and application performance is consistently high-performing. In fact, the Director of IT Strategy reports that in terms of flow, In Extenso has seen up to a 10 times improvement.

Cushman & Wakefield built a secure access service edge (SASE), leveraging the automated integration between the EdgeConnect platform and Zscaler cloud-delivered security. This provided each of the 220 locations with local internet breakout while enforcing security controls over traffic flow. By consolidating on the EdgeConnect platform to enable a SASE architecture with Zscaler cloud-delivered security, Cushman & Wakefield expect OpEx savings of $1.5 million per year.

With deployment of the Aruba SD-WAN, Nuffield Health users now have access to business-critical SaaS and IaaS applications via the cloud and without impacting the performance of the network. “We now have visibility and control into our network, meaning we can see how SaaS and IaaS is being used. This level of cloud intelligence is critical to our organisation as we continue to embrace new healthcare technologies available in the market.” The IT Operations Director concludes.

SD-WAN could connect all Cushman & Wakefield’s branch locations securely and directly to the cloud, with full resiliency and assurance of predictable and consistent application performance. This allowed them to grow through mergers and acquisitions, avoiding WAN bottlenecks, which would have resulted in slow application performance and a poor end-user experience.

With centralised SD-WAN management through Aruba Orchestrator, the IT team at In Extenso improved visibility and control, streamlining troubleshooting. “We gain real-time visibility into what is happening on our network and save a significant amount of time on network administration thanks to Orchestrator,”. Moreover, In Extenso is now well positioned to adopt more advanced technologies such as 5G and further improve business capabilities nationwide.

All routing and edge security is now handled by EdgeConnect. We micro-segment our network with a lot of trust zones between different VLANS. We’ve been able to map all our Cisco access lists into the zones in EdgeConnect using Orchestrator. Untrusted things like alarm panels and ATM machines are in their own zones on EdgeConnect. Doing all this in Orchestrator is very simple.

We can centrally define application classes and security policies, allowing the EdgeConnect appliances to intelligently make decisions on how to ideally route traffic. This allows us to get into the provider backbone networks at the nearest point of entry for each location, improving application performance and quality of the end-user experience.” This carefully orchestrated control over traffic flow and application prioritisation, combined with SD-WAN network optimisation, has improved application performance on average by 35 percent.