Back to Case studyAn Agile Ambulance Service Provider Upgrades its online Network with Smart VPN for Secure and Fast Access to Cloud platforms
ShareIntroduction
Based in Hyderabad, the company is a leading medical transportation service provider in the city. It has an experienced team of emergency personnel to facilitate reliable medical transportation round-the-clock. With a fleet of 900 ambulances, the organisation has partnered with several hospitals to help patients get the best possible care in their areas. Ambulances are packed with top-of-the-line equipment and patients are accompanied by well-trained personnel when they are taken to medical centres. The organisation also has provisions for an air ambulance to help patients who need to be transferred to far-off medical centres in emergencies.
The company needed a customised private network solution for securely connecting to the Genesys and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platforms. It wanted to rise above the weaknesses of public internet services by maintaining its own Virtual Private Network (VPN). It selected Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) to build the system. As an experienced telecom service provider, TTBS has designed Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) based VPNs for several enterprises. Our solution for such jobs is called Smart VPN – a private, dedicated, reliable networking medium that connects users to Cloud service providers via MPLS as a backbone.
Business Challenges
To manage its medical transportation services from any location, the company had subscribed to Genesys and AWS Cloud platforms. However, it was only using public internet services provided by different telecom vendors to connect to these Cloud platforms. The employees did not have privatised access to the Cloud, and the usage of applications was vulnerable to weaknesses in the core data connection.
It was essential to get over such vagaries by upgrading to a private MPLS-based network. They also wanted the private network to have certain features:
- It had to be telco-agnostic and provide secure connectivity without having a complex infrastructure or design
- In a multi-application environment where the employees were using applications with high bandwidth consumption in routine workflows, it was necessary to prioritise mission-critical traffic
- The IT team needed access to a portal to view network performance statistics and ensure that latency and jitter were under control
As the data connectivity services were provided by different vendors, the company wanted the MPLS solution with an end-to-end service level agreement (SLA) – this was necessary to ensure high availability and get timely technical assistance whenever required.
TTBS Solution
TTBS leveraged its Smart VPN to configure the company’s private network over fibre optic broadband and third-party Internet Leased Line (ILL) services that were active at different branches. Our solution architects connected them all to the main hub location while ensuring robust last-mile connectivity.
The MPLS-based private network built by Smart VPN enabled the organisation’s teams to securely access the data centre at the main headquarters at a faster speed. It also helped them to connect to Genesys and AWS applications through a private channel, separated from the public internet paths to Cloud resources.
TTBS provided Smart VPN as a completely managed solution with configuration support, change management support, asset management services, device health monitoring and proactive monitoring for MPLS links. In deploying the private networking solution, we also met the expectations specified by our customer:
- The deployment was quick and the network was successfully built over wired and wireless data services provided by different service providers
- We used a simple hub and spoke model to keep the network infrastructure uncomplicated
- Smart VPN provided the flexibility for prioritising mission-critical applications during peak usage hours, and in such cases, delay-resistant traffic such as email and general web browsing could be routed through alternate routes
- With the iManage portal for Smart VPN, IT administrators could view network performance in real-time and ensure that the functioning of any application was not disturbed by excessive jitter, latency or packet loss
- The IT team could also raise a ticket through the iManage portal in the rare case of performance issues, and engineers from TTBS were always available to resolve the same in the promised timeline
The uptime of more than 99% and the troubleshooting time against any glitch were documented in an end-to-end Service-Level Agreement (SLA).
Providing Layer 2 security to the company’s private network, TTBS mitigates the risk of cyber-attacks and ensures that remote teams can communicate effectively to provide consistent medical transportation services.
Our data services could not give us the level of security we needed to access our files and applications in the Cloud. TTBS Smart VPN addressed this challenge cost-effectively, the customer said. We built a private network that not only secures usage of Cloud platforms, but also provides better speed and efficiency for their digital operations
Benefits
- More coordinated teamwork with faster access to Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video and enterprise applications used at work
- Managed network with a complete view of application performance and flexibility to customise traffic routing
- Resilient business continuity supported by high and SLA-backed network uptime
- Future-ready architecture for growing business requirements
- Optimised cyber security on a private network safeguarded against usual data services’ vulnerabilities
