The City of Whittlesea has partnered with Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, to become the first Australian city council to deploy Aruba SD-WAN, optimising connectivity across 15 branch offices whilst significantly lowering costs, streamlining IT resource and providing greater flexibility in setting up new locations.
Aruba SD-WAN enables the City of Whittlesea's infrastructure team to deploy, configure and manage both WLAN and WAN traffic across multiple branch sites, from small offices to community activity centres and libraries, all from a single pane of glass.
The solution has supposedly removed the constraints of the City of Whittlesea's costly legacy connectivity technologies to provide a flexible network that enhances branch visibility, management and control. This has optimised operations for their lean infrastructure team, allowing them to effectively manage more branch locations with fewer resources and reduce operational costs.
Whittlesea team leader David Holt says, “Aruba SD-WAN has solved our branch visibility and operation limitations, reducing the time it takes our infrastructure team to deploy and manage our WAN network.
“There was a lot of day-to-day maintenance involved in running our previous solution that we simply couldn't dedicate resource to. Aruba's solution has removed this demand on resource and simplified our operations, allowing our team to focus on more critical business projects and, most importantly, deliver significant cost savings”, said Holt.
With Aruba SD-WAN, the council can now connect all branch locations to the head office network, and at the same time have both corporate and public access to council services available at those sites.
The solution also gives the City of Whittlesea new flexibility, allowing the council to quickly and easily add new locations, both permanent and temporary. For example, branch gateways can now be deployed at the touch of a button at pop-up community events.
Aruba South Pacific director Anthony Smith says, “We are proud to deploy Aruba's first city council SD-WAN solution, delivering increased visibility and control, enabling the City of Whittlesea to reduce its operational costs and benefit from an agile network.
“A key feature that attracts our customers to Aruba SD-WAN is the cost savings that it delivers – moving networks to lower-cost links and improving the visibility and management of branch traffic. This greater visibility of devices and network traffic inside City of Whittlesea's branch office locations means the council can now easily troubleshoot the source of issues affecting the WAN and branch level networks.
“Our SD-WAN solution helps our customers to do more with less and we're delighted to have helped the City of Whittlesea improve its network efficiency and reduce its operational costs in this way.
“We look forward to supporting City of Whittlesea's dedicated infrastructure team as they deploy the solution across the council's activity centres, leisure centres and offices, simplifying WAN routing and enhancing the council's network performance to improve the end-user experience for staff and constituents.
The Aruba SD-WAN deployment is part of the City of Whittlesea's wider digital transformation project to enable a mobile-friendly workforce and offer constituents digital services, such as free, public Wi-Fi.