Insurance provider improves reliability and reduces risk with enterprise WAN refresh
Summary
As a provider of integrated insurance and healthcare, our customer needed a network refresh to improve reliability and add security and resilience. GDT delivered an enterprise WAN solution that consolidated the company’s network architecture and enhanced capabilities across security, performance, management, and more.
Customer overview
The challenge
Aging WAN edge appliances, including firewalls and routers, were undermining the provider’s performance and uptime. Furthermore, leaders were unhappy with inconsistent hardware support levels and had experienced firewall coding issues, environmental outages, and unplanned outages during upgrades, all of which negatively impacted the business.
To address these challenges, our customer wanted to refresh network hardware across its 40+ locations, simplify the network architecture, and drive stronger resiliency and security capabilities. In addition, the entire upgrade would need to be accomplished with little to no disruption to the business.
Additional project requirements included:
- Data center and edge firewall upgrades across 40 sites
- Streamlined network and firewall management
- OEM account ownership support
Solution: Enterprise WAN refresh
Our customer had done business with GDT for several years, and we had established a long-term, trusting partnership. At the outset of the project, the customer team requested that GDT help identify, understand, and navigate the company’s key challenges. To do so, we began with a virtualization assessment as well as networking workshops around WAN, wireless, and switching.
With a clear view of the needs to be met, we were able to begin creating a strategy for execution:
- We led with our engineering expertise.
- We identified the customer’s business functionality.
- We provided the customer with an outcome-based solution.
- The solution was inclusive of network, security, and professional services.
The client received a functional WAN solution that accounted for hardware consolidation, resiliency, and best-in-class security features with Palo Alto firewalls. Our enterprise networking offering allows the customer to dynamically support multiple WAN uplinks per facility and sustain operations without intervention in the case of a network failure. It also simplifies overly complex network configurations with strategic alterations to some components of its WAN network functionality.
Solution components included:
- Deployment of Palo Alto Networks PA-1400 series firewall appliances at edge sites
- Deployment of management infrastructure
- Migration services to transition the customer from OEM-proprietary protocols to an industry standard BGP
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The results
GDT completed the network and firewall refresh within an eight-month timeline. Now, our customer benefits from increased healthcare network resiliency and an effective security transformation.
In addition to the business benefits delivered through our outcome-driven engagement, GDT has helped the customer achieve several additional results, including:
Time and costs saved through added operational maturity and streamlined workflows
Enterprise networking solutions from GDT
From network resiliency to security transformation, GDT’s enterprise network solutions help our customers achieve outcome-based solutions that ensure cost-efficiencies and reduce operational complexity.
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