Nuffield Health chooses Silver Peak for SD-WAN implementation

Nuffield Health has implemented Silver Peak's Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN to help bring its apps into the 21st century.

The private healthcare firm was struggling to keep up with demand of its business-critical application demand because so much data needed to pass through its network, both from a customer and an employee point of view.

With 20,000 users across more than 260 sites throughout the UK - including 31 hospitals, more than 100 fitness and wellbeing gyms, and 121 corporate fitness and well-being centres - the company's existing multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) WAN couldn't keep up.

Applications such as its TrakCare for Electronic Medical Records and Office365, plus its infrastructure delivered via Microsoft Azure, weren't effectively using the resources available.

“As a not-for-profit healthcare organisation, with sites located across the UK, our staff rely heavily on data-critical applications to care for patients and to meet the needs of our customers,” said Dan Morgan, IT operations director at Nuffield Health.

“Whether it’s accessing digital images on the operating table, or using the latest high-tech gym equipment, it was clear that our existing network infrastructure wasn’t up to scratch," Morgan said. "As such, we required a reliable WAN solution that would improve network performance and securely support our cloud-first IT strategy.”

After analysing usage, it discovered almost two-thirds of its WAN traffic was being pushed through its datacentres to the internet, which was causing a bottleneck.

Silver Peak was chosen as the technology of choice due to its high performance and promised cost savings, which is essential for a not-for-profit organisation like Nuffield Health. The provider also needed to find a solution that would integrate with its zScaler and Palo Alto Networks, which Unity EdgeConnect is able to do.

After implementing the SD-WAN service, Nuffield Health explained it can run dual internet links to its branches, including 4G LTE as a short-term solution until its fibre internet service is delivered.

“We have been really impressed with the positive impact on our network, but the speed of deployment was a massive bonus,” continued Morgan. “We also have complete visibility and complete control into our network, meaning that we can see how SaaS and IaaS is being used within the organisation. This level of cloud intelligence is critical to our organisation as we continue to embrace new healthcare technologies available in the market. This will only serve to improve the health of our patients and customers across the UK.”