Client Bio:
A 46-site comprehensive lifestyle service and hospitality company growing through acquisition.

The Challenge:
The client is made up of subsidiaries that have historically operated on disparate systems without centralized IT oversight. The new Director of IT & Managed Services, along with his team, was charged with streamlining IT operations across all the subsidiaries as their organization continued to move critical applications to the cloud.

Their security stack included various technologies and required high administrative overhead. Network connectivity & voice services were on various providers with staggering contract end dates and some sunsetting network services needed to be replaced. They were looking for a solution that was simple to manage and would allow IT to uniformly apply network and security governance across the enterprise. ​

The Solution:
ARG’s Senior Consultant, Kelly Ahmed, worked with Senior Network Product Specialist, David DeCillis, to examine multiple approaches to leverage SD-WAN technology to reduce complexity, replace antiquated high-cost network services, and provide increased visibility and uniform application of security practices across the organization.

They explored a self-managed Meraki solution, co-managed cloud-based solutions, and fully managed cloud-based SDWAN solutions to allow the client to do the following:

• • Centrally manage, monitor, and deploy all network functions
  • Create consistent and easily deployed security policies across the entire network and accommodate future growth
  • Consolidate infrastructure and security investments into a single low-cost cloud solution

In addition to defining and documenting the pros and cons of the possible approaches, the ARG analyst team priced out options on all the relevant solution providers and laid out an easy-to-understand matrix analysis of each provider’s ability to deliver on the client’s key business requirements and costs. The ARG team worked with the client to identify the right choice for their business requirements. The chosen solution met all the client’s business objectives and was able to converge WAN routing and security into a single hardware appliance to simplify rollout. ARG assisted with contract negotiations and once signed, brought in ARG’s client experience team.

The ARG project experience team oversaw the migration to ensure that all parties hit their milestones. They followed up after the install to ensure billing was correct and the business objectives had been met. For ongoing issues, ARG’s client experience team is available 24×7 to open and work tickets if issues arise, saving the IT team time.

Bottom Line:
The client received consistent policy in-house or remote. Visibility and simple hardware design allowed a limited IT team to shift security inspection to the cloud, and consolidate management to a single vendor, with one bill, a predictable cost model, and additional support.