Harrison Lewis wasn’t looking for SD-WAN, but he’s glad he found it.

Northgate Gonzalez, which operates 40 specialty grocery stores throughout Southern California, had distributed its compute power for years. Each store individually supported applications with servers and other key infrastructure and relied on batch processing to deal with nightly backups and storage, according to Lewis, the privately held company’s CIO.

More about enterprise SD-WAN:

  • 10 hot SD-WAN startups to watch
  • How SD-WAN saves $1.2M over 5 years for a radiology firm
  • SD-WAN deployment options: DIY vs. cloud managed
  • SD-WAN: What is it and why you’ll use it one day
  • How to choose the right SD-WAN transport and why it matters

Over time, the company’s needs changed, and it began centralizing more services, including HR and buying systems, as well as Microsoft Office, in the cloud or at the company’s two data centers. With this shift came a heavier burden on the single T-1 lines running MPLS into each store and the 3G wireless backup. Complicating matters, Lewis says, rainy weather in the region would flood the wiring, taking down terrestrial-network connectivity.

To read this article in full, please click here