Every business contracts a network service provider with the expectation of improving network reliability, performance, and security. So what happens when the reality falls short of expectations? Locked-in deals can leave organizations trapped, paying for poor network reliability and services that don’t meet their needs, and legacy infrastructure that makes network administration complex and costly.
This post looks at how a national law firm found themselves facing these challenges and how Turnium delivered a simple, flexible, cost-effective solution that gained the law firm the time, efficiency, network performance, and flexibility they were seeking.
Multiple Challenges: Network Reliability, Performance and Security
After committing to a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) contract with a telecommunications provider, this law firm found that their networking solutions weren’t measuring up. The firm was left feeling trapped and unsure of how to migrate to a different solution that would provide:
- Improved network reliability, performance, and security
- Simplified operations and ease of management
- Lowered costs and better return on investment
The firm’s network featured:
- Four sites with 30Mbps MPLS and two backup circuits
- One site with 10Mbps MPLS
- Two sites with just broadband and VPN
- QoS deployed on all circuits with permanent reservation for voice and video
- No encryption on MPLS
- Cost of over $6000 per month
In addition to the typical applications (case management, document management, video calling, and IP voice), the firm was running an overnight data backup across this network from midnight to between 8:00 and 9:30 am each day.
Turnium SD-WAN: A Flexible Solution
Simplifying operations, cutting costs, and improving the quality and security of their network were not possible with traditional network migrations. The staggered expiry dates for their MPLS contracts and the requirement to maintain operations at all sites meant that a rip-and-replace strategy was out of the question.
Turnium’s solution allowed the customer to complement bandwidth on their existing MPLS network by aggregating its bandwidth with the new SD-WAN solution at each site until each contract expired. Then transitioning to SD-WAN without disrupting operations — and revenues. Essentially, Turnium provided a graceful sunsetting of MPLS agreements and a process that mitigated risk.
What Benefits did Turnium’s Solution Bring?
Deployment
Turnium deployed virtual SD-WAN aggregators at the firm’s data center locations to integrate the SD-WAN and MPLS networks, making a true hybrid network possible.
Demonstration
Two sites were targeted for the first cutover, allowing the law firm to realize the real-world value of SD-WAN by seeing the additional bandwidth and performance of the SD-WAN network for themselves.
Performance
Link Aggregation (bonding) of the MPLS with broadband circuits from different providers at each site gave the bandwidth and performance required, together with increased reliability and dramatically better price performance per Megabit.
Backups
Additional seamless backup connectivity was provided using failover LTE connections.
Reliability
Packet-level traffic distribution across each aggregated circuit provided network reliability with sub-second failover in case of circuit degradations or failures.
Efficiency
Bandwidth was allocated to priority applications using dynamic QoS to protect the most essential traffic when bandwidth is compromised.
Security
Routes were created between the SD-WAN network and the MPLS network on the firm’s core routers to use the MPLS as pure transport and running a virtual tunnel over both the MPLS and broadband circuits. All traffic on the backbone was now fully encrypted and individual sessions split across different networks.
Results
After all the sites were migrated and the MPLS circuits removed (at the end of each contract), the virtual SD-WAN aggregators were turned down and removed, further simplifying the network architecture.
“Turnium was very flexible with the solution, as they included our current MPLS circuits in the design and had a roadmap for their decommissioning.”
— Manager of IT Infrastructure
Improved Network Reliability Top Benefit of MPLS to SD-WAN Strategy
The Turnium solution gave the law firm an out — a way to migrate to a better network without facing the hefty costs that would come from breaking a contract with their telecom provider.
“Other solutions we reviewed were either running in circuit failover mode, had high up-front capital costs for hardware, or were overly complex to design and deploy.”
– Manager of IT Infrastructure
More importantly, the firm realized the benefits they had hoped for, plus some advantages they hadn’t even considered:
- Reduction in monthly recurring costs
- Simplification of operations and vendor management
- Improved customer visibility with new dashboard access
- Greater flexibility to achieve performance targets
- Enhanced reliability
- Elimination of vendor lock-in with built-in carrier diversity
- Increased performance and efficiency
- Additional redundancies to improve resilience and network reliability
“Turnium’s deployment plan was tailored to our network and needs. I’d recommend Turnium to anyone looking to save money on costly IP-VPN circuits; to anyone who needs to use their idle backup circuits to their full potential; and to anyone who wants an SD-WAN solution without the complexity or cost of the other major players.”
– Manager of IT Infrastructure
Is Turnium Cloud-Native Managed SD-WAN Right for You?
Like the law firm, your organization can benefit from our SD-WAN solution. Whether you’re facing the challenge of vendor lock-in, looking for efficiencies, aiming to improve security and resilience, or looking to save cost on services, Turnium’s service is the answer. (Gartner predicts that more than 90% of networks will be deployed using SD-WAN by 2023.)
Contact the experts at Turnium today to discuss your networking needs and how we can help.