Back to Case studyAn Established Manufacturer of Polymer Compounding Products Links its Plants and Offices to Smart VPN-Based Private Network
ShareIntroduction
The company is a leading producer and supplier of premium reinforced polypropylene compounds, thermoplastics elastomers, fibre-reinforced composites and engineered plastics. It is one of the top manufacturers supplying modified plastics for automotive and consumer products. During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also diversified into the production of high-quality Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) kits, flat-fold disposable respirators, surgical masks and hand gloves.
With manufacturing facilities in Manesar, Chakan (Pune) and Puducherry, the enterprise has also received several industrial certifications. Most of its plants and offices comply with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001 and OHSAS 18001 Standards.
When the organisation needed to connect six of its work locations on a private enterprise network, it contacted Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS). The IT managers were looking for a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) solution and found it in the Smart Virtual Private Network (VPN) offered by us. On getting a demonstration of how it worked, they also liked its Secure Connect aspect that safeguards the use of Cloud applications. Satisfied with the information they received about Smart VPN, the company’s IT management team asked TTBS to deploy the networking solution.
Business Challenges
Managing its production and administration work from multiple locations, the company needed a private Wide Area Network (WAN) for collaboration between teams. There were six locations to be connected with bandwidth requirements of 10 to 20 Megabits per Second (MBPS).
The teams sought a high level of security in the network to use their Cloud applications without the threats that disrupt vanilla internet connection services. The applications they used in their daily workflows included Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) and Systems Applications and Products High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA).
Although the organisation could have continued using basic data connectivity service with extra firewalls, it decided to switch to MPLS because security was not the only issue faced in networking. Some of the other challenges were:
- No visibility into the performance of enterprise applications to check how productively were the teams working
- Inability to prioritise the functioning of latency-sensitive applications during peak periods of network usage
- Frequent downtime issues and absence of failover systems
Lastly, the IT managers wanted the MPLS service with an end-to-end Service-Level Agreement (SLA) and real-time performance reporting abilities. They also needed it to be telco-agnostic.
TTBS Solution
Our solution architects built the manufacturing company’s private network using Smart VPN to connect six of its geographically distributed locations. We used Layer 3 VPN that supports full mesh technology for seamless links between all offices and manufacturing plants.
TTBS Smart VPN established telco-agnostic, any to any MPLS connectivity relying on a seamless structure to support secure usage of Cloud applications on a private network. The connection also came with high throughput and low latency.
The challenges that were faced while connecting over basic internet services were now resolved:
- Smart VPN’s network had predictable performance and IT managers could view the functioning of different Cloud applications through a centrally managed portal.
- The solution also provided traffic engineering and Quality of Service (QoS) abilities to prioritise mission-critical traffic during peak hours.
- If the network got congested at any site due to simultaneous usage of multiple applications, the IT team could route delay-tolerant traffic to circuitous and less utilised links to free up capacity for business-critical applications on lowerlatency paths.
- With its MPLS attribute, Smart VPN enhanced the uptime by reducing the scope for human error in setting up paths across WAN – it brought a fast reroute feature so that traffic could be automatically switched to the alternative path if there was an outage on the primary link.
TTBS provided an SLA-backed service with burstable and scalable bandwidth to allow the organization to use more heavy-data-consuming applications in the short and long term.
Benefits
- Productive usage of Cloud applications on a private network connecting plants and offices
- Robust business continuity with an automatic failover system
- Improved cybersecurity with no exposure to the vagaries of the public internet
- Future-ready network infrastructure to accommodate changing business needs
- Better uptime alongside the ease of prioritising traffic on WAN
