As the company grew, Alewijnse found MPLS connectivity to be increasingly unable meet its business requirements.
The Dutch engineering company had built a global wide area network (WAN) out of MPLS and Internet services connecting 17 locations — 14 in Europe and 3 in the Asia Pacific — with about 800 mobile and field employees. Internet access was centralized in the datacenter for its Dutch sites; the Romanian office had its own firewall and Internet breakout. Three Asia Pacific locations established virtual private network (VPN) tunnels across direct Internet access (DIA) connections to the Amsterdam datacenter.
Users increasingly complained about their Internet performance. Cloud applications were starved for bandwidth as they were backhauled across a 10 Mbits/s connection to the datacenter. At the same time, carrying Internet-based traffic across MPLS was increasing their MPLS spend each month, consuming nearly 50% of the MPLS bandwidth to the datacenter.
MPLS was also limiting IT agility. The business needed to quickly establish project teams at customer sites all over the world, a need MPLS often couldn’t meet. “With MPLS, I often had to wait three months to get a connection, if the technology was even available in that region,” says Willem-Jan Herckenrath, manager of ICT at Alewijnse.
And MPLS did nothing for his security architecture. The firewall appliances that secured his branch offices required substantial operational costs involving deployment, management, and upgrades. Mobile security was an issue and another area ignored by MLPS.
Herckenrath and his team considered bundling SD-WAN solutions with a secure web gateway (SWG) service and another provider’s backbone. But they rejected the idea. “The feature comparison looked good on paper, but they were more difficult to implement and much more expensive than Cato Cloud,” he says.
Instead, he addressed all of his MPLS connectivity and security requirements with Cato Cloud. To get the full story click here.