Sun International increases WAN business usage and cuts bandwidth costs with network optimization solution.
Business Challenge
Sun International Management Limited invests in and manages businesses in the hotel, resort, and casino industries. The group is specifically focused on the development, operation, and management of hotels, resorts, and casinos across Africa and South America.
The hospitality group wanted to install a centralized customer relationship management (CRM) application across all its operations, and quickly realized that it did not have sufficient bandwidth to run the application. To effectively run the application, the group would have to upgrade its infrastructure, which would double its bandwidth costs.
Sun International tested a number of products available on the market and decided to standardize on a network optimization solution, Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), across the group, based on the performance and costing of the solution. After implementing the solution, the CRM application achieved optimization results of 72 percent, enabling the group to run the CRM application while utilizing its existing infrastructure, without having to upgrade or add additional bandwidth.
Solution and Results
Following the implementation of Cisco WAAS, Sun International has reported a reduction of 42 percent on bandwidth usage. Another significant benefit is that the solution has enabled an overall improvement of the utilization of the existing infrastructure by maximizing the performance of all the group's business-critical applications.
With an optimized WAN, the IT department is also able to offer improved service delivery to users. As business requirements change, they are able to enhance agility within IT and achieve faster response times for requests of new services.
Moreover, one of the requirements for Cisco WAAS to work optimally is that it needs to be implemented on a stable WAN. Prior to implementing the solution, Sun International went through the process of documenting its WAN (i.e., by analyzing traffic flows and routing information) to help ensure stable performance. As a secondary benefit, the group is now not only empowered with a stable WAN, but has gained sufficient knowledge of its network to alleviate any security risks and potential failure.
For More Information
For more information about Cisco WAAS, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/waas.