Managed SD-WAN Resolves Bandwidth, Budget, and Security Challenges for State Agency
The Hughes Managed SD-WAN solution maximizes throughput at each site while increasing the agency’s overall security posture.
Customer
The Judicial System for a large southwestern state is a sprawling government agency with multiple courts and administrative offices.
Duties include:
- Enabling employee communication across departments, sharing sensitive legal documents and evidence, and archiving legal proceedings and public records.
- Providing citizens with important e-services, such as the ability to pay traffic fines, access jury duty summons, and seek victim services.
- Connecting with sister agencies within the state government, including the Departments of Labor, Treasury, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Parks, Education, Liquor Control Boards and others.
Challenge
With the fast pace of change and the role of emerging technologies, the state’s networks were crippled beneath processing demands. Outdated technologies caused inefficiencies, especially as offices attempted to transition to cloud-based applications. For many years, the state was locked into a technology services contract with a single provider for all its agencies, without the ability to procure new products and services outside of the vendor’s offerings.
Hughes Solution
As the end of the contract neared, the state recognized an opportunity to better position itself and be rid of such restrictions. It created a statewide contracting vehicle featuring three best-of-breed vendors, including Hughes. It also outlined a protocol for agencies to encourage bidders to offer innovative and creative solutions to achieve specific objectives, rather than dictating technology specifics. In this way, the state was able to ensure that network services would accommodate growth, change, and future modifications.
Hughes was selected as its vendor of choice and partnered with the IT team to design a Managed SD-WAN solution that maximizes throughput at each site while increasing the agency’s overall security posture. Features include:
- Managed SD-WAN solution at 72 sites tailored to fit the needs of individual locations and the overall enterprise.
- Expert guidance in how to build the security architecture to ensure the network had the appropriate firewalls and monitoring, detection, and response services.
- Longer-term cloud strategy outlined to facilitate SD-WAN related decisions, such as defining the need for broad access to multiple cloud points of presence.
- Optimized bandwidth to prioritize critical applications, enabling the rising number of mobile users to access the Web without negatively impacting network performance.
- These and other solution specifics provided a cost-effective way to achieve next generation capabilities and security across the entire enterprise and meet the agency’s objectives–without being handcuffed in the future.
Hughes Technology Highlights
Hughes Managed SD-WAN Services can be implemented on an existing network infrastructure quickly and easily, and provide the following advantages:
- Enable government agencies to scale up capacity to meet rising demand for digital services and cloud-based infrastructure and optimize performance across a variety of transport types.
- Budget friendly option to increase network capabilities without the costly expense of additional circuits; and provides more advanced security across the entire network.
- Support more devices and more applications, while users enjoy exceptional application performance.
Today, Hughes has tens of thousands of Managed SD-WAN sites under management for customers.