Scenario
The company Souza Cruz was slow to access all its systems, from the internal ones, like emails reading systems, intranet, trip requisition, SAP and billing, as the external ones and navigation in the Internet. The slowness mainly affected the Distribution Centers and Billing Sector in more than 20 cities in Brazil.
In order to solve the issue, Souza Cruz disregarded the Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) link upgrading possibility, given the high cost. Also, in some business units, telephony operators did not offer higher speed links, even if the upgrade was authorized. The solution would be to improve the access speed by 30% in corporate email systems; 60% in the Internet access locally; and 10% in billing systems.
Strategy
Through its existing agreement with Nap IT, which gave visibility to other innovations applied in Souza Cruz, the company was able to implement an innovative project focused on balancing the network to solve the slowness. The IT area was directly impacted by complaints and escalations from users. The sales area, approximately 20 units in Souza Cruz scattered throughout Brazil, were impacted due to the slowness.
Nap IT has studied the related incidents from each location, the impacted systems and the technologies involved, to extract network performance reports and bandwidth consumption. Also analyzed were the impacts generated by the system slowness and the number of overtime worked by employees to perform tasks after being affected by infrastructure failures.
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), responsible for transmitting data more economically than an MPLS network, and a network device called Firewall (Cisco ASA), responsible for network balancing and business units high availability.
Results
Souza Cruz benefited from a new link (backup) integration; by having business data traffic – such as SAP systems, billing, corporate e-mails – trafficked through MPLS links; by having non-business related data traffic – such as Internet browsing, personal e-mails – trafficked through ADSL or dedicated links; by having a device called Cisco ASA Firewall for properly configured network balancing, detects dropped links and directs all traffic to the link that is operating normally, thus acting as an automatic contingency.
Within the network balancing project configured by Nap IT, speed improvement goals were exceeded, with new integrations generating 50 percent improvements in access speed and usage in corporate email systems; 80% on the Internet locally; and 30% in billing systems. In addition, there were savings in not having to upgrade the MPLS link, and benefit to processes because critical systems do not traffic on the same network as non-critical systems, that is, the data does not compete and does not compete for space on the network .
