Credit: Dreamstime
Sydney-based IT managed service provider mcrIT has extended its relationship with the Australian Red Cross to roll out Cisco Meraki across all sites in metro and regional areas.
The humanitarian aid charity operates out of 70 sites across the country in a combination of remote, regional and metro sites with a reliance on remote workers. Its IT environment featured a mix of technologies from various vendors, resulting in complicated support contracts to service equipment in remote areas.
The in-house Australian Red Cross IT team noticed an increase in support tasks relating to ageing infrastructure and network downtime, coupled with the increased security risk posed by remote workers.
In addition, the existing multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network was no longer a cost-effective solution, effectively leading to the transition towards a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) environment.
“Initially, we engaged mcrIT to roll out this solution to our sites in capital cities only,” Australian Red Cross IT systems engineer Simon Urban said. “We were so impressed with their service delivery that we extended the contract to cover all of our sites.”
Incorporating the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) principle of moving to a more user-centric mindset, mcrIT implemented a Cisco Meraki (SD-WAN) solution including firewall, malware protection and intrusion prevention.
Meraki devices and access points were implemented across the entire network, improving network operations and security posture. Using the cloud-managed dashboard, the Australian Red Cross internal IT team can remotely manage the network, alleviating the need for support resources in remote regional areas.
According to a recent Gartner report, the past several years have seen a large-scale shift from traditional MPLS-based customer edge routers to SD-WAN technology, with overall spending on WAN edge to grow 2.6 per cent per year through to 2025.
As the world shifts from working from home to working from anywhere, companies have begun to shift away from the VPN as the main tool for keeping remote workers secure and towards more-fully featured SD-WAN technologies, with the idea of eventually implementing zero-trust network access for maximal security, Gartner’s report noted.
