06 December 2022

An international humanitarian organisation actively involved in global relief operations in emerging markets was seeking a flexible solution to secure and improve the performance of the hybrid network. The entity required a safe and efficient network extension from its headquarters and data centre to remote country and regional offices, and into the cloud.

A key principle in global relief operations, the client required not only network services for its own offices and staff, but also the ability to share their services with other humanitarian organisations or to emergency responders on their premises, in Africa and beyond.

Seeking a managed, secure network

The humanitarian relief organisation needed to secure, manage, monitor, and improve the performance of its hybrid connectivity network. The global network largely consisted of many Marlink very small aperture terminal (VSAT) stations and unsecure local Internet Service Providers connectivity (ISPs).

The customer was faced with the challenge of managing the local networks at their remote premises and needed an end-to-end solution with the ability to easily scale up any office environment.

With cyber-attacks and data breaches on the rise, it was imperative for the relief organisation to protect its data. Therefore, a provider that could seamlessly manage all network links between the headquarters and data centre to remote country and regional offices, and into the cloud, was required. A full integration of network security was also a criterion to secure internet, critical data, LAN (WiFi and wired), voice and video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

“We needed a secure, scalable and cost-effective solution to manage multiple sized offices with multiple connectivity links. In addition, it was critical that our remote users have a secure and optimised access to cloud services to perform their work. Due to emergency conditions and sometimes lack of local resources in rural areas, the solution also needed to be easily implemented (plug-and-play) and immediately provide wired and wireless local network services to all users,” stated the humanitarian customer.

Offloading network management

The humanitarian relief organisation duly appointed Marlink to deliver on its needs.

To improve network performance and enhance data protection, Marlink provided a customised network-as-a-service (NaaS) solution, acting as a single supplier of managed IT and network services and cloud access.

One key aspect of the NaaS solution is the software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) orchestration. Application-based routing management enables traffic prioritisation and load sharing for more efficient bandwidth use and increased network capacity. The network management is centralised so traffic priorities, configurations, and network policies can easily be applied remotely across all sites in different geographic locations.

SD-WAN enables an intelligent assignment of key applications to different connectivity links including VSAT, MSS, fibre, 4G/LTE as well as Internet connections (ISPs). Based on the traffic priorities set by application, the network load is balanced, and path routing is defined to ensure optimised performance. Latency-critical services such as ERP, videoconferencing, cloud services and collaboration tools are prioritised and will not be interrupted.

The solution provided wired and WiFi network access to all local users. As an office grows, services can easily be expanded by plugging in additional access points for WiFi or network switches for wired networking. Additionally, network security was applied to protect critical data and eliminate unwanted traffic through intrusion prevention systems, firewalling, antivirus, DNS filtering, SSL inspection and web filtering.

Marlink also enabled cloud access to Microsoft Azure and Office365 by providing private high-speed peering from the Marlink backbone. Access to its data centre was set up through the Marlink MPLS Backbone.

Today, the humanitarian client has offloaded the day-to-day burden of running the network directly to Marlink, which took on responsibility for overall network management.

The NaaS solution is a flexible service; when the humanitarian organisation requires new, customised, or enhanced configurations and capabilities (cyber detection, firewalling, filtering, cloud access, bandwidth-on-Demand, etc.), it can be simply integrated through Marlink’s unified portal in one click.

The following benefits were delivered:

• Secure connectivity for all the remote users
• Optimised traffic and bandwidth use for faster application performance
• Better user experience
• Full interconnection to cloud services through private high-speed peering
• Control of transport to Data Centre through the Marlink Backbone for faster data delivery
• Enhanced network security (WAN &LAN)
• LAN scalability options with plug & play deployment
• Proactive network monitoring
• Content filtering to ensure that other applications do not consume the bandwidth allocated to corporate traffic
• Enhanced visibility, control, reporting and alerting

“To help our customer get the best user experience to all their employees across the world, we support them by managing their large, hybrid WAN infrastructure,” said Alexandre de Luca, president of energy, enterprise and government, Marlink. “They needed IT and network management services to optimise all the used connectivity links, from satellite to 4G/5G. Through a network providing the fastest speeds, low latency, and secure direct access to the cloud, we provide a Managed Multi-WAN and LAN infrastructure where we are managing global and local network parameters based on quality of service, including SD-WAN orchestration on an application-by-application basis. With this approach, our customer now experiences stable connections for data-intensive applications such as Teams call, and users working on remote sites have shifted from a local area network experience to a true cloud service. In short, we enable application control all the way from remote LAN to Cloud.”