Today’s small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to share information and applications securely and privately between multiple locations of the organization. And they must achieve that cost effectively with good efficiency. For that, SMBs need the right tools. While legacy services are costly and unreliable, broadband services are difficult to deploy. In essence, without the right tools, IT services can be costly, insecure and unable to effectively track business performance across locations.
The modern answer is multi-protocol label switching or MPLS. It offers several benefits, which include better performance, lower total cost of ownership, greater flexibility to accommodate new technologies, better security and survivability. For instance, it uses class of service (CoS/QoS) and priority queuing so your network knows which traffic is most important and ensures that it takes priority over other traffic. Plus, the SMBs can reduce on-going WAN operating costs by up to 50 percent, while maintaining a high level of reliability and service.
Studies show that the ability to handle multiple protocols enables MPLS to respond rapidly to changing business needs, with faster response times for many applications. Also, the time and cost involved in managing disparate locations is cut significantly, while online reporting enables businesses to truly see what is happening on the network, allowing the company to subscribe only to the bandwidth needed. In short, MPLS simplifies the administration and on-going management of a company’s complex networking needs.
Consequently, to streamline multi-location communication services with centralized, on-demand solutions over a single high-bandwidth network infrastructure, Salt Lake City, Utah based cooperative wholesale food distributor Associated Food Stores has selected Integra’s MPLS virtual private network (VPN) and session initiation protocol (SIP) solutions. According to Integra, it’s SIP solution has allowed Associated Food Stores to adjust bandwidth allocation for data services or voice traffic, maximizing network utilization and eliminating the expense of separate networks.
Integra said that it has built a customized set of communication services to serve Associated Food Store’s specific business needs for its 400 retailers in eight Western States and 45 retail grocery stores in the region. These include IP/MPLS VPN, which increases speed and manageability of data flows, allowing the grocery distributor to purchase bandwidth and scale services according to the requirements of individual operations. Integra is also migrating the food distributor’s physical Primary Rate Interface (PRI) trunks to the company’s SIP Trunking service, centralizing management and troubleshooting of the company’s entire communications network to a single platform.
Edited by Blaise McNamee