The challenge

A simpler and more cost-efficient way

Elopak is a long-standing GTT customer, having for many years run an MPLS-based WAN to connect its sites. However, to support its fast-growing business and evolving cloud-centric operating model, including a move from Skype for Business to Microsoft 365 and Teams, Elopak needed a simpler and more costefficient way to manage the growing need for internet access at many of its sites around the world.

Stephen Aitken, Corporate IT Infrastructure Architect at Elopak, is responsible for the company’s global network team. He explains, “Our core network uses MPLS-grade communication, which is vital for many of our services.

It allows you to use QoS to reserve bandwidth for critical applications. However, when you start to have a lot of traffic to cloud services and the Internet, sending all of it across your MPLS network can create an unnecessary overhead. Our roadmap helped us pinpoint SD-WAN as the right technology to support our cloud journey.

We went through an RFI process to find out whether we should implement SD-WAN ourselves, work with a new vendor or continue with our existing provider, GTT.”

“We chose GTT due to the strength of its technical solution and its cost effectiveness. Our Managed SD-WAN implementation with GTT was excellent.”

Elopak

The benefits

A network that’s simple to manage

By deploying GTT Managed SD-WAN, Elopak has been able to reduce the number of network-related devices at each of its sites, easing day-to-day management for the network team. Aitken explains, “Our GTT Managed SD-WAN service has helped us remove a lot of complexity. A big change is that caching is built into the SD-WAN box, so we’ve been able to remove the caching devices and systems we had at each site previously. This means we no longer have to administrate and provide support for so many different devices.”

With GTT Managed SD-WAN, all networks are managed via a central orchestrator accessed through the GTT EtherVision portal. This gives Elopak improved control and visibility of its entire enterprise network. “With our SD-WAN orchestrator, we can now see everything across the network in real time,” Aitken says. “We can see all devices and traffic traversing the different lines we have, which helps with identifying any issues quickly. We’ve also designed business overlays that decide which data isn’t so important or ping-sensitive, which help us easily optimize our usage and capacity accordingly from within the portal

Cost-optimized bandwidth with no idle backup circuits

Elopak has moved away from using a primary circuit with an idle secondary “backup” circuit, only utilized when the main circuit goes down. Today, the manufacturer enjoys the cost and performance benefits of being able to use all lines and manage traffic more appropriately according to its destination.

“We worked with GTT to consolidate our lines,” Aitken explains. “With an all-MPLS WAN, the backup lines are sized to take the load, but you may never use them. Now that we’ve implemented business-grade internet from GTT as the backup instead, we can use both the MPLS and internet lines simultaneously. So, we gained usable capacity as well as saved money by right-sizing our MPLS bandwidth and using the internet lines to break out the internet-bound traffic.”

Improved network performance for the cloud

Bringing all of Elopak’s connectivity into one Managed SD-WAN environment has brought down the number of network incidents and length of response times significantly.

“Changing to SD-WAN helped us and GTT reduce the frequency and impact of network outages,” says Aitken. “Our new network offers a great user experience thanks to the cloud-centric and activeactive setup we’ve put in place with GTT, and the ticket volume our team receives has dropped by about 80%. When we do have an incident, it’s much quicker for us to work out what the problem is and get it fixed. The huge added benefit is that our team can now focus on new and exciting projects that enable our business, such as those involving machine learning or AI and predictive maintenance.”

Increased agility for changing business needs

Its new services from GTT have helped Elopak take its network agility to new heights. The bandwidth on each SD-WAN device can be upscaled quickly using any available access types, reducing the need for long installation wait times. Locations can be rapidly deployed or decommissioned on Elopak’s network.

“Let’s say you have a project at a site that will last six months,” Aitken explains. “With SD-WAN, you can quickly boost your capacity for the duration and make sure you have enough capacity for everyone. We can work with GTT to get connectivity or bring our own should we want to. GTT really proved the strength of its network and the SD-WAN technology to us when the pandemic hit, where the team worked with us to quickly ramp up our capacity so we could get our thousands of employees up and running securely and with the bandwidth to handle the change.”

“Our new network offers a great user experience thanks to the cloud-centric and active-active setup we’ve put in place with GTT, and the ticket volume our team receives has dropped by about 80%.”

Elopak