Global Digital Transformation through Managed SASE Service

Author: Chris Walsh

Obtaining access to efficient and reliable suppliers presents a significant barrier to scalability and security for a company with offices distributed across multiple territories. Our client, a UK-based pharmaceutical company with offices across the UK, Netherlands, India and Denmark experienced just this issue, requiring the intervention of a suitable service provider to aid in their SaaS and managed services deployment.

As a rapidly growing and dynamic business, our client is constantly in the process of launching into new markets, openingnew entities and evolving their products and portfolio to service an expanding customer base. This requires the ability to scale quickly and securely. As their network was not ideally suited to this, they frequently encountered operational obstacles. They had legacy infrastructure in place with many different technologies to manage, creating a large management overhead for a small IT team. In addition, they needed to enable users to safely work remotely. There was an existing but costly point solution in place for this which had not proven as effective as they had hoped. The IT team is UK based which presented a challenge supporting different global timezones.

Lack of scalability, poor user experience and security risks to users presented the most significant barriers to the client’s overall success. In addition, ensuring that necessary tools were kept up to date while juggling other demands was challenging for the client. 

The client was also in the process of moving to increase the use of SaaS applications and cloud computing, the legacy infrastructure was ill-suited to this task and would have required an additional solution to connect and secure. This created additional costs for the client and slowed progress as a result.

Our client needed a solution to bridge these gaps. This solution would require a scalable approach and support from a partner to cover the regions and time zones that the client could not manage in-house, whether from the perspective of skill or resource. This partner would need to improve security, whilst also enabling the client to focus on their own business. The ultimate priority for the client was to focus on the growth of the business and aligning to the right partner would facilitate this goal. 

To help the client achieve their stated goals, Viadex deployed our Managed SASE service. This connects all of the client’s offices, users, applications and resources (DC and Cloud) securely and globally. Our approach with SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) combines SD-WAN (Software Defined, Wide Area Network) with a cloud-native enterprise security stack. What this means is our clients benefit from a hugely simplified network architecture designed for a digitally transforming business. We remove the need for multiple legacy security point solutions such as different firewalls and remote connectivity. This, therefore, removes the overhead to manage and maintain those different point solutions. Furthermore, Viadex then manages the SASE network which means the client’s IT team are freed from the burden. This leaves the client’s IT team  to focus on the business initiatives of digital transformation  supporting strategic growth. In addition, the SASE approach supports the move into Cloud and SaaS applications. SASE is an innovative approach to network and security requirements which connected all our clients sites across a global private backbone. SASE modernises the security approach and ensures network resilience. 

Viadex is one of the leading partners to Cato Networks which are recognised by Gartner as leaders and founders of the single vendor SASE market. Many vendors are trying to achieve the same benefits of Cato SASE by integrating multiple tools they have acquired but this then fails to streamline the management overhead and really solve the challenges of the legacy approach. Viadex provides 24/7 critical infrastructure support, so the client is no longer restricted to the UK IT team support hours. The business is thus prepared to scale. 

This SASE service also means cloud instances, such as Azure or SAP are treated in the same way as their own DCs or sites which again removes the need for alternative connectivity and security solutions for the cloud. Moving to the Viadex SASE managed service means greater scalability, an improved security posture, and improved user experience whilst lowering the long-term cost of ownership and support for a multi-vendor network and security architecture.