How SD-WAN Can Improve Office 365 Application Performance 20x

When Platform Specialty Products Corp. decided to go all-in with cloud computing, the company recognized it needed a modern WAN to support the new architecture. After reviewing the available options, settled on a global SD-WAN from Aryaka and ditched MPLS.

Stan Yarbrough, the company’s Senior Global IT Architect, explains the challenges Platform Specialty Products faced — especially when it came to supporting cloud resources such as Microsoft Office 365 and Azure — how it came to select Aryaka, and his deployment experience in a new webinar entitled, “Optimizing Office 365 Global Deployments.”

Headquartered in West Palm Beach, the global chemical production company caters to agriculture and electronics manufacturing markets and employs 8,500 people worldwide.  Locations for the agriculture side of the business are scattered among very remote locations, Yarbrough says, while the electronic side has many locations in China.

The business was built through mergers and acquisitions that resulted in a patchwork quilt WAN that was mostly MPLS and point-to-point links.  When it decided to move everything to the cloud – Azure and AWS for infrastructure, cloud-based storage, a cloud-based PBX, Office 365 for collaboration and a host of other SaaS offerings — Yarbrough went looking for a cutting-edge network to support the effort.

MPLS was going to be too complex, too expensive and was going to take at least 18 months, Yarbrough says.  What’s more “it seemed like a step backwards,” he says, because MPLS doesn’t offer compression, optimization or any of the other modern necessities.

A key objective was to deliver consistent Office 365 and SharePoint experiences regardless of where in the world the users and the cloud resources were located.  The question became, how do we do that without having distributed domain controllers, file servers, etc., he says.

After contacted a range of vendors and analyzing their approaches, “Aryaka bubbled to the top very quickly,” Yarbrough says.

“Aryaka was the only true SD-WAN out there” that provided all of the answers Platform Specialty Products was looking for, and Aryaka was able to fully deploy to more than 200 locations in just over six months, he says. “All major sites were up in the first 30 days.”

In the webinar, Yarbrough goes in-depth into the resultant benefits:

• 20x better performance than the company had with MPLS
• More than $3 million in annual savings
• A fully managed service that freed up time IT can use on other pressing issues

Check out the webinar, “Optimizing Office 365 Global Deployments”, to learn more about Platform Specialty Products Corp.’s network decision making process and experiences, and an in-depth exploration of the trends reshaping the WAN landscape.

About the author

Jig Ruparel

Jig Ruparel is the Principal Strategic Architect at Aryaka. He has over 15 years of experience mentoring existing system engineers and solutions architects on best practices for global network deployment. He has held senior advisor, architect, and consultant roles with some of the leading cloud and SaaS, SDN, and ERP providers in the industry.