A multinational sportswear designer and manufacturer was looking for a more efficient network to connect its 200 retail stores across the Asia Pacific.
The company was using disparate networks from multiple services providers, which included the public Internet. There were separate service level agreements for devices and connectivity, which limited the company’s visibility into network performance and meant that the company had to contact the hardware and connectivity provider separately if any networking issue arose. With this arrangement, provisioning new sites and implementing network changes also took a long time.
To address this, Singtel proposed a unified Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) and Global Internet offering. This gave the company a single overlay network with similar feature sets across all transport modes managed by Singtel including the Internet, MPLS and 4G/LTE.
With this solution, network changes could be done centrally with flexibility and agility. The company could also make use of configuration templates to provision new sites quickly and efficiently.
The solution meant that the company now enjoys the benefits of having a single service provider with end-to-end service management encompassing the overlay and underlay network. A unified end-to-end SLA provides availability assurance across all sites, including those with only Internet and LTE connections.
The 4G/LTE capabilities provide a backup solution with affordable network redundancy as well as rapid provisioning for ad hoc requirements. In the event of a disruption in the fibre network, the SD-WAN router can provide continued connectivity using a SIM card as a temporary backup.
If rapid network deployment is required, for example for pop up stores, the company can make use of the SIM card to get immediate connectivity, compared with fibre which typically takes 8-10 weeks to provision. Like other transport modes in the hybrid network, traffic going through the 4G/LTE network can be managed centrally through the SD-WAN portal.
