This is a guest blog post by Grace Cosgrove of Edge7 Networks.
Coillte Forest is a state-owned agency in Ireland responsible for the sustainable use and management of woodlands in the country that account for about 7 percent of Ireland’s total land mass. The agency is responsible for managing forestry, industrial development, infrastructure, tourism, and more for the land under management.
Coillte operates 35 sites that include offices, nurseries, and sawmill weighbridges across Ireland, often in remote locations.
Technology plays a key role in managing its operations, and Coillte needs excellent communications and connectivity to support its services. This created a challenge in recent years because of the increased dependency on technology.
Most of Coillte’s sites were connected via legacy MPLS over copper connections, where available, which meant low and often insufficient bandwidth. Reliability and availability were poor, leading to frustration, inefficiencies, and implications to the business. Even the performance of the HDX-delivered apps suffered.
To improve connectivity at its sites, Coillte turned to Edge7 Networks, a leading EMEA-based Citrix SD-WAN provider.
“With years of experience in delivering SD-WAN solutions to low-bandwidth locations, we conducted a Citrix SD-WAN pilot with Coillte to demonstrate Citrix SD-WAN’s ability to optimize low-bandwidth solutions and aggregate with other connectivity, such as 4G,” says Ronan Murray, Director at Edge7 Networks. “A pilot was required to ensure we got adequate bandwidth to these remote locations.”
Coillte not only received great feedback from users, but, for the first time, it got real visibility into the traffic traversing the WAN and how their connectivity was being used.
Following the pilot’s success, there were several key challenges Coillte needed to address as part of a full Citrix SD-WAN deployment. Edge7 Networks designed and deployed a solution that solved each one.
Getting Connectivity Right with Citrix SD-WAN
The legacy MPLS circuits used to connect Coillte’s office sites presented several business challenges. For example, some had connectivity that was either over- or under-provisioned.
With Citrix SD-WAN, however, Coillte can flex its network bandwidth up or down, aggregating different services and different providers to give burst capability to meet their needs, which wasn’t possible with MPLS.
Right-sizing connectivity helps Coillte adjust costs and move from a strategy of reliance on a specific carrier’s MPLS environment, to one where IT can choose the best connectivity for each site from any provider in the area.
Citrix SD-WAN Enables Improved Resiliency, Availability
Availability was also an issue for Coillte. When there was an outage with MPLS, it would take time for the back-up connection to become active, resulting in downtime at the offices and weighbridges, leading to poor customer service, delays, and, ultimately, extra cost.
Citrix SD-WAN has given Coillte improved resiliency and availability. By aggregating multiple circuits across copper, fiber, and 4G/5G, bandwidth and diversity also increased. Previously, staff could only use their core business apps. Now, they have the capacity and performance capabilities to use unified communications and collaborate via video with Microsoft Teams, which they couldn’t do before deploying Citrix SD-WAN.
Adapting traffic delivery for the cloud
Coillte operates a hybrid environment hosting high-end applications in their datacenter while running Microsoft Office 365 and SaaS apps through the cloud.
This transition to the cloud meant the business needed to modernize its traffic delivery. Rather than backhauling traffic through the datacenter, Citrix SD-WAN delivered local breakout to optimize app performance while still ensuring security and a consistent user experience.
Changes in access with any devices and any location requirements
Coillte wanted to right-size connectivity at each site to avoid overpaying, while ensuring they had the flexibility to cope with spikes in demand when more people than usual were working from any one site.
Citrix SD-WAN provides Coillte’s offices with local internet breakout, so staff enjoy the best possible performance whether using private or public cloud apps. Connecting this into Coillte’s Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops delivery ensures users have a consistent and secure experience on any device, from any location, no matter the app. And Citrix SD-WAN’s reporting enables Coillte to optimize bandwidth further to meet the demands of hybrid work.
“Citrix SD-WAN has made a real, positive difference to both users and business operations for Coillte,” Murray says. “For organizations facing connectivity challenges in rural, urban, and global locations, we deploy Citrix SD-WAN to improve connectivity, enhance user experience, and make the network work better in a hybrid world.”
Read the full Coillte story, and learn how Edge7 can help you.
