Finance Industry- security project case study
About the company
This company is a natural gas distributor headquartered in Portland, Oregon that provides natural gas service to over 730,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Originally starting as a small business with just 49 customers in one square mile of Portland over 150 years ago, this company is now the largest independent natural gas utility provider in the Pacific Northwest.
CHALLENGES
Network redundancy
This organization lacked both strong network redundancy and viable disaster recovery for their four work sites in Oregon. When there were failovers of network systems, connections would be lost, uptime is compromised, and it was difficult to recover. This was due to their out-of-date wireless network system. These include issues with their wireless network as well as outdated controllers and switches - factors that inhibited the company from functioning with minimal interruptions.
Lag
Office staff would often experience lag, and they often made complaints about the wireless performance interfering with their work. As a result, since the internet was vital for their everyday operations, many essential tasks couldn’t be completed, affecting the service delivery to their entire. The enterprise company turned to PM2NET to upgrade their existing wireless network system.
ASsessment and solution
Many workers were unsatisfied with the wireless performance of the organization, and the engineers determined that the cause was from the company's infrastructure operating through an outdated controller. Their current Cisco model 5508 lowered the performance of the network overall. PM2NET determined that they needed to upgrade their previous Cisco model 5508 to a more current Cisco model 5520.
Advantages
IT staff determined that they needed improvements in network redundancy and recovery. Access points have a certain signal radius, and outside that radius, the signal would have been too weak to run the network. The Cisco 5520 Series offers high-availability features, including sub-second failover for AP and client failover. This reduces network downtime. Further, with the Cisco 5520 controllers as part of their environment, it created better redundancy because multiple sites with these high-performance controllers is able to upkeep the network in case a controller fails.
Network management tools from the new model also offered a single point of management for all of the access points in the network. A feature called Application Visibility and Control (AVC) provided granular classification and prioritization for thousands of business-critical apps with dynamic protocol updates.
Cisco 5520 was recommended by the PM2NET team because of a variety of reasons, including the scalability of supporting many APs and users. After the upgrade of their wireless network, company workers and staff experienced great improvement in both performance and speed. Their newly modernized wireless network model ultimately allowed for better network management and enabled the company to work more efficiently with far less lag. This circumvented any compromise of workloads due to networking issues.