ChannelVision Magazine

“Our MPLS provider pro- posed this very intricate ar- chitecture that looked like it was from a CCNA test,” says Kevin McDaid, systems man- ager at Fisher & Company. “The sites ended up with dual routers running HSRP (the Hot Standby Router Protocol) to load balance traffic be- tween them. But when the protocol failed, so did the location.” Survivability was a chal- lenge in other ways as well. Backhauling traffic across the MPLS network created a single point of failure. “When the provider’s MPLS router failed, we lost our headquarters and the en- tire company stopped work- ing,” he says. “I was woken up in the middle of the night on several instances because a fiber cut or power outage had taken down a site, or to get the provider to fix a minor firewall problem.” Finally, managing the MPLS and security infrastructure was painful. McDaid and his team had to jump between “tons” of management interfaces, he said. They could monitor firewalls and the network, but the provider had to make any changes. “Something as simple as enabling access to a website through our firewall meant having to call support. It was very frustrating,” said McDaid. Fisher began looking at SD-WAN as an alternative. “We trialed a managed SD-WAN service, but the provider was difficult to work with,” recalled McDaid. “The management console was very complicated, and you needed training just to run the reporting. They wanted us to submit requests for configuration changes; it was like our MPLS provider all over again.” Instead, Fisher turned to Cato. Cato’s SD-WAN service integrates advanced security with an affordable global, SLA-backed backbone – the Cato Cloud. With Cato, McDaid could retain control over his network and security infrastruc- ture yet gain the agility and scaling benefits of a cloud service. Despite paying so much less for Cato, Fisher maintained and even improved its ap- plication delivery, and call quality has not changed since moving voice from MPLS to the Cato Cloud. “I don’t have exact percentages, but uptime has certainly increased,” said McDain. What’s more, ap- plications have become more responsive, he said. “Users definitely feel it in their user ex- perience. Things like screen refreshes of our ERP system seem to be a lot quicker with Cato.” The improvement was enabled by the additional bandwidth, and the Cato Cloud’s network character- istics. “The loss and latency of the Cato Cloud are comparable to our MPLS service,” he says. Management has also become much easier. The Cato Manage- ment Application gives McDaid full control over his network and secu- rity infrastructure. And instead of jumping between many consoles, McDaid can manage everything from one interface. Resiliency improved with Cato. Internet- and cloud-bound traffic are no longer backhauled to Fisher’s headquarters in Michigan, which created the single point of failure in Fisher’s old network design. Dual active lines connect every location to Cato’s fault-tolerant architecture. Internet- and cloud-bound traffic are sent directly onto the inter- net; enterprise WAN traffic is sent across Cato’s optimized backbone to the appropriate location. “I can definitely sleep better at night with Cato,” said McDain. o The Number of Devices Companies Use in Thei IoT Solutions Source: Business Insider Cato vs. MPLS: Annual Spend Comparison Source: Cato Networks; Fisher & Company Global WAN Optimization $7,000 Connectivity $84,000 Other $233,000 Last Mile $85,000 Cato Cloud $30,000 Cato + Internet $115,00 MPLS $324,000 51% 1-50 51-100 101-300 301-500 501-1,000 1,000+ 52% 13% 9% 11% 11% 6% 4% 4% 5% 16% 19% 2016 2017 Top Challenges MSPs Face When Selling Telephony Solutions 80% virtual reality 22 Channel Vision | January - February, 2018