In a recent Frost & Sullivan enterprise survey, 85% of the business decision-makers surveyed said “improving customer experience” was the top-rated driver for digital transformation initiatives, followed by “improving compliance” and “improving operational efficiency.” In the same survey, IT decision-makers indicated hybrid cloud, network and application security, and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) as the top three technology trends in the next two years.
“Versa eliminates appliance sprawl in the branch office with a software-based approach to SD-WAN and security functions. Customers use zero-touch provisioning to deploy a fully featured set of Versa SD-WAN and branch security capabilities onto a single appliance. Capex is significantly reduced through replacing expensive, proprietary network hardware with Versa SD-WAN software and low-cost appliances. Opex is greatly reduced as truck rolls for installation and upgrades are eliminated, hands-on time at branch sites is minimised, and system scalability is assured without hardware refreshes. These benefits are evidenced by a number of successful applications in various market sectors, including healthcare,” says Andre Kannemeyer, CTO at Duxbury Networking, distributors of Versa technology.
Accelerating healthcare business growth with SD-WAN
A national dental practice that provides accessible, high-quality dentistry and orthodontics to patients of all ages needed to transform its legacy infrastructure to address multiple challenges related to its ongoing expansion: WAN resiliency, demand for availability and security compliance adherence.
With the practice rapidly growing, it needed to support its 41 dental offices with direct internet access, hosted voice, data storage and applications for billing, insurance and patient records. All offices also needed to meet necessary security and HIPAA compliance. With new locations on the horizon, additional issues that could impede future growth needed to be addressed including:
Better internet connectivity in underserved areas. Offices needed to provide highly available connections for workforce collaboration tools including hosted voice to improve customer service and reduce response times.
HIPAA compliance management is a complex and arduous task taking months to handle software upgrades for the practice’s national footprint after internal validation. Deployments and documentation needed to be more efficient.
Opening up new offices used to take as long as 90 days due to provider circuit and vendor equipment lead times. Time-to-market had to be improved to meet patient and practice demand.
After a careful assessment of the dental practice’s unique business needs, it was determined that Versa Networks was the best technological solution. This offering enabled the enterprise to reduce both its Capex and Opex costs, with an increased bandwidth and improved IT responsiveness. The time and effort required to manage the practice’s network and application performance was minimised and overall enterprise security was enhanced as a result of the managed SD-WAN deployment.
The strategy significantly reduced the practice’s overall IT spend, improved and secured its site-to-site connectivity, and efficiently increased overall bandwidth – all while enabling the management of the entire network as well as standardised security policies in an active-active environment through a single pane of glass.