Ensuring High-Quality, HIPAA-Compliant Communication with the Help of Consolidated Technology and an Up-to-Date Voice Solution

INITIAL BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Overcoming High-Latency Voice Connection with MPLS

Through a discovery meeting with the customer, we uncovered that they were experiencing voice quality issues with their existing SD-WAN solution. The customer was using two broadband connections at each location (AT&T U-Verse and Coax circuits). The connections were experiencing high latency and packet loss that greatly affected voice quality.

Our Solution: We implemented a voice-only MPLS network to carry the voice traffic and act as one of the underlay tunnels in their existing SD-WAN environment. Once the contract came up for renewal with their SD-WAN vendor, we recommended Masergy’s Fortinet SD-WAN solution to replace the existing network. We upgraded the MPLS as one of the underlay tunnels to handle other real-time applications including VDI and took over the broadband aggregation for their secondary WAN connections.

SECOND BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Transitioning a Legacy System to Modern UCaaS

The customer had a legacy, on-premise PBX that was end of life and end of support.

Our Solution: We migrated the customer from their legacy PBX to Masergy’s Broadsoft-based UCaaS solution for all their users. This gives them an all-in-one, cloud-based communications platform that includes meetings, video, chat, phone, file sharing, and more.

THIRD BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Enabling HIPAA-Compliant Remote Connectivity

The customer was using an MSP that provided on-premise firewalls at each site. The firewalls did not pick up a BitTorrent application that was running inside the network. This caused major security risks within the customer’s environment, putting the customer out of HIPAA compliance.

Our Solution: To decrease threat exposure, Masergy’s Shadow IT function immediately scans and identifies all applications, providing clients visibility through the SD-WAN portal. Because of the risks associated with the customer’s existing edge security solution, we enabled the security functionality on the Masergy Fortinet SD-WAN appliance. This gave the customer an allencompassing SASE solution with both SD-WAN and security through a single appliance. We are now in talks with the customer about enabling Masergy’s remote worker VPN functionality as well.

IMPACT TO THE CUSTOMER’S BUSINESS

What started out to be a discussion on how to solve the customer’s voice quality problems turned out to be a win-win for everyone. In the long run, the customer was able to lower overall network costs, simplify and consolidate vendors, reduce security risks, and get what they wanted to begin with: a feature-rich, up-to-date voice system with great clarity. The customer now has a secure SASE solution with inherent redundancy, seamless failover, quality of experience for their real-time applications, next-gen firewall functionality, and a single number to call for support. The technology behind these solutions includes: a secure, reliable UCaaS, an updated SD-WAN with NGFW (next-gen firewall) security/SASE, broadband aggregation, POTS line aggregation, and MPLS services all from a single vendor. By asking questions and discovering what issues the customer was facing, and then solving them, they now bill 80K per month which will generate more than $500K in GP over the contract term.