“With over-the-air provisioning, you just drop the box in the store and it’s ready to go. You can pick anything you want for a connection and not have to change network operations on the back end,” says Miller. “You can also prioritize traffic based on business rules to, say, give traffic related to sales transactions a higher priority than web surfing.”
The VeloCloud admin dashboard greatly simplifies network monitoring and troubleshooting, he adds. And that will prove especially handy as Brooks Brothers begins to roll out SD-WAN to many of its overseas locations over the next 18 months. “Because we’ve got IT people spread across the globe, we can give our tech people in India or the Far East access to the VeloCloud control panel, so they can monitor their environment and take action if a store is suffering from degraded network performance.”
SD-WAN Simplifies Branch Management for Banks
For customers of STAR Financial Bank, doing business with a friendly face makes a big difference. That’s why the Indiana-based community bank installed interactive teller machines at all 45 locations, so customers can talk with tellers via a live video feed.
Until last year, all of those ITMs were connected via an MPLS network, says Brian Avery, systems and infrastructure manager for STAR. And like Brooks Brothers, STAR was finding those circuits costly, inflexible and unreliable.
“We needed carrier redundancy, as well as flexibility in choosing our service providers and types of connectivity,” says Avery. “There’s a limited number of MPLS players, but an increasing number of local ISPs that provide good service, especially in rural areas. Our ability to work directly with these ISPs has given us more control over the network and more redundancy, which in turn greatly increased our reliability.”