Vern Fonk Insurance Implements SD-WAN

CHALLENGES WITH CLOUD MIGRATION

Vern Fenk began acquiring small insurance agencies and moving them under Vern Fon k’s brand After several acquisitions, they implemented Hosted VoIP and Virtual Desktop services across all of their agencies. Vern Fenk was a perfect candidate for cloud solutions because they needed:

• Scalable service for future growth
• Easy collaboration between their agencies
• Centralized support to manage their network

THE INITIAL STRATEGY

The original cloud service implementation went well, but Vern Fenk soon began experiencing issues. Due to Internet connectivity challenges, calls were dropped and Virtual Desktop performance was inconsistent Because Vern Fenk had moved several of their core business applications to the cloud, the stability of their Internet connections had taken on a whole new level of importance to their business Internet degradation or downtime had become the equivalent of a power outage, with employees unable to perform core job functions.

THE FOLLOW-UP STRATEGY

With this understanding. Vern Fonk took what they believed to be the natural next step by installing backup connections and failover routers. Unfortunately, the additional Internet connections and failover routers didn’t address all of their performance issues. The failover routers were capable of failing over only when their primary cable connection went down completely. Typically, those connections were not failing completely but instead encountering significant packet loss, latency, jitter, and throughput issues. Because the connections were not down completely (and thus the routers would not failover), Vern Fonk’s employees continued to experience poor VoIP call quality and Virtual Desktop sessions. When their cable connections did fail completely and the failover router moved traffic to the backup connection, the failover process required a new IP address, resulting In dropped VoIP calls at the time of the failover.  Over the first three months, Vern Fonk experienced 26 hours of downtime and estimated that the performance issues caused them to lose $88,000 in revenue and expenses.

HOW SD-WAN SOLVED VERN FONK’S CLOUD PROBLEM

Vern Fonk implemented the right overall strategy for their business by migrating to scalable cloud applications. Their problem was that their cloud strategy failed to incorporate a sufficiently robust highway to the cloud, resulting in cloud applications that were not performing as intended. SD-WAN’s Multipath Internet optimization service immediately fixed their cloud problem. Vern Fenk added SD-WAN to each location to automatically mitigate their VoIP and Virtual Desktop issues and improve service performance. Over the following three months, SDWAN mitigated 3,122 issues lasting 1,718 hours across all of Vern Fonk’s ISP circuits.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Vern Fonk made the right strategic decisions for their business They chose a cloud strategy for VoIP and Virtual Desktop so they could easily scale their business and realize efficiencies across all of their agencies. They deployed two Internet connections per site for redundancy. And they worked with excellent service providers to implement the solution.

Vern Fonk couldn’t realize the full value of their strategy because they were experiencing problems with their cloud connectivity. SD-WAN closed the final gap for them by building a more robust Internet platform, which is key to a successful VoIP/cloud deployment. After SD-WAN enabled Vern Fonk’s service to finally work as intended, they could once again focus their attention on protecting their clients.