Healthcare cost negotiator improves application access and quality of experience for remote users with Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN

To deliver cost-saving solutions to healthcare providers and insurance companies, this company's staff across the U.S. must access its critical VoIP system, and business and data analytics applications, in a central data center. However, MPLS transport brownouts on the wide-area network (WAN) caused unpredictable performance, which was unacceptable for assuring business productivity and high-quality customer services.

The company's senior director of telecom and data center management, explains, "We had two MPLS providers for each office, but brownouts were common and could be very disruptive to the business. Combined with limited WAN visibility and the high cost of MPLS, we decided to invest in SD-WAN."

Gaining More Network Control

MPLS brownouts don't trigger automatic failover, so the IT team had to rely on the provider to resolve any issues—and the response was often slow. Even in the event of a circuit outage, where traffic from one MPLS provider would automatically fail over to another MPLS circuit or a backup dedicated internet access (DIA) link, the failover process could take 15 to 45 seconds, disrupting services for that time.

SD-WAN was identified as a way to gain more control over network service reliability and quality. After evaluating Silver Peak, acquired by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, along with Cisco and CloudGenix, the company selected the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform with optional Aruba Boost WAN optimization. The fact that Silver Peak (now Aruba) is ranked consistently as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant was an important factor in the decision.

The senior director notes, "We also favored EdgeConnect because it provides voice replication across multiple links, which is critical to prevent dropped calls for our contact centers and negotiating teams."

SD-WAN Resolves Brownout Issues

The company deployed the EdgeConnect platform in each of its nationwide offices, as well as its production and disaster recovery data centers. The business offices are equipped with dual redundant EdgeConnect appliances, configured for high availability and terminated with one MPLS circuit, one DIA link, and a broadband connection.

"With all three links available to us simultaneously, EdgeConnect automatically load balances traffic across all three links, which wasn't possible before," the senior director says. "MPLS brownouts are no longer an issue, and with sub-second failover from one link to another, the failover is unnoticeable. Employees can do their jobs and customers can access their portals with no disruption due to network issues."

Unifies routing and simplifies security

With routing interoperability and a zone-based stateful firewall unified on EdgeConnect, the company retired its MPLS routers and legacy firewalls at all but two sites, consolidating from four devices to just two EdgeConnect appliances at each location.

The senior director says, "We no longer need support on those separate devices, which is a cost saving, and we reduced the number of potential points of failure."

To secure the SD-WAN, traffic is only permitted from one EdgeConnect appliance to another for data center access and inter-office communication. One exception is local internet breakout, secured through the zone-based stateful firewall on EdgeConnect, enabling offices to directly access cloud-based solutions such as Zoom and WebEx.

"Being able to configure local breakout based on application type is an additional benefit of the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform," the senior director points out.

Centralized visibility and control

Another advantage Aruba brings, especially compared to other SD-WAN vendors the company considered, is the Aruba Orchestrator management console. Orchestrator provides the IT team with centralized management for the entire nationwide SD-WAN.

With Orchestrator, the team can easily apply business intent overlays for different classes of applications. For example, VoIP is classified as real time, while web-based applications are classified as critical, guaranteeing each application class the network resources needed based on business priority.

Orchestrator also improved network visibility, streamlining updates and troubleshooting. "Before, we had very little data on what was happening on the WAN," the senior director recalls. "Now, Orchestrator enables us to see traffic on each overlay as it's presented to the EdgeConnect appliance. Information is all in one place instead of multiple consoles, which makes it much easier for my team to get the detailed network reporting and analytics they need."

Boosts Productivity and Quality of Experience

Assuring consistently high application performance is central to business productivity for the company. By applying Boost WAN optimization across all data center and contact center applications, employees have seen a dramatic improvement in application performance, especially those in remote offices.

"Boost has been a big help for our work-at-home locations, some of which are very remote," the senior director says.

He also points out that employees who use Citrix to connect back to the data centers saw the greatest improvement. "We've cut response time in half with Citrix—in many cases from four seconds to two seconds or less."

The senior director concludes, "Providing reliable access to our data center applications is key to the business. The Aruba SD-WAN meets that important need, and delivers a high quality of experience to both employees and customers."