Mazars deploys hybrid WAN

As a UK firm with a global footprint, Mazars UK runs multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) circuits from its data centre located at its headquarters in Tower Hill, London, to its sixteen UK offices and five international offices supporting 2,200 employees. When the company opened its international branch sites in Sydney, Delhi and New York, Quality of Service (QoS) across its existing MPLS WAN architecture impaired the performance of its cloud-based applications, including Citrix for printing, and Skype for video and voice calls.

As a result, Mazars UK sought an SD-WAN solution that would allow it to leverage a hybrid WAN approach, where lower cost, higher bandwidth broadband services could be used to complement MPLS and to eliminate the need to backhaul all application traffic to its central site. Starting with its Sydney office, Mazars is reducing its dependence on international MPLS lines by migrating to local internet breakout. This will deliver secure, direct branch to cloud application access and provide the highest levels of application performance.

Mazars UK turned to Silver Peak Summit partner, Solar Communications, for a solution that would support its digital transformation initiative. Solar proposed the Silver Peak EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution to enable more granular control of their WAN, delivering increased availability and improved application performance, while also enabling Mazars UK to leverage existing network investments to reduce overall WAN cost. Mazars deployed EdgeConnect hardware appliances across its international sites in Delhi, Sydney, Toronto, and New York, as well as in its UK sites, due to the need for high-performance and reliability.

“The existing WAN infrastructure was designed to support our UK operation however, it was starting to creak and was certainly not capable of supporting us internationally,” said David Bennett, chief technology officer (CTO) at Mazars UK. “With the introduction of a range of new cloud-based solutions, we knew that we needed to change our underlying infrastructure to support all our offices – and critical to that was a transport agnostic SD-WAN solution.”

Mazars UK is making use of Unity Orchestrator global management software for unprecedented visibility and control of data centre and cloud-based applications. Its unique ability to centrally assign business intent policies to secure and control all application traffic will help the company achieve its future mission of embracing a fully cloud-based environment using Microsoft Azure and Office 365.

“Silver Peak has become a fundamental part of our infrastructure,” concluded Bennett. “Building our global IT infrastructure from the ground up, we would not have been able to provide predictable levels of service to our users without the Silver Peak SD-WAN solution. What’s more, the implementation was pain-free and as we look to move toward a fully cloud-based environment, Silver Peak will help us to manage that transition – and our costs. We knew Silver Peak was reliable through previous work and that it does exactly what it says on the tin.”

“The innovative ways enterprises are going about transforming their businesses are very impactful. This is particularly evident for IT departments as they increasingly migrate workloads to the cloud to enhance business agility,” said Kristian Thyregod, vice president of EMEA sales at Silver Peak. “We are delighted that Mazars is able to embrace the cloud now and in the future, without compromising network or application performance and availability.”