Cloud network helps health care provider reel in remote-office costs

November 11th, 2016

From an information technology perspective, small and midsized businesses with multiple locations get it in the neck. They often need to keep an arsenal of technology in place for protection and compliance reasons, even when the staff size in far-flung offices is tiny.

North Carolina-based Universal Mental Health Services Inc. was in just such a quandary when it constructed a virtual private network to serve more than 900 people in 13 offices across the state. Each office needed to connect to the corporate headquarter in Lenoir. To support security and performance needs, the health care provider deployed hardware firewalls from SonicWall Inc. to each location, as well as multiprotocol layer switching, a fast but expensive network switching protocol.

But maintaining such a widely distributed network became expensive and error-prone.