CHALLENGES

One of the UK’s major transport and logistics providers approached PAV as they were experiencing ongoing issues with their on-site network. Having served the business well for 10 years, the legacy networking infrastructure was beginning to show its age. This was leading to issues with the performance, reliability and supportability of the entire site’s network.

As part of this exercise the organisation reached out to various different regional professional services firms that had the required Cisco skills and experience. Given PAV’s long expertise in networking and ongoing support services, the customer made the decision to partner with PAV i.t. 

SOLUTION

Having understood the customer’s pain points, the PAV team’s networking specialists got to work. The first task was to use Auvik’s dynamic network fault finding suite to diagnose the extent of the issue – the network probe quickly found that the main issue was with network port finding.

The PAV team were able to leverage their partner status to secure aggressive price points from the vendor. This meant PAV were able to pass an extremely competitive price on to the customer.

Cisco’s Meraki solutions provide speed, reliability and performance through enterprise-grade WiFi. The platform also provides advanced security features that are essential for such a strategically important customer. Through an intuitive dashboard, the customer’s own team and PAV’s specialists can remotely take total control of any incident from alert through to resolution.

With Cisco Meraki, PAV have been able to solve the customer’s initial pain points, and deliver even greater value as the trusted relationship has developed. The project then became a full 18-month network refresh programme for the PAV team. This involved close collaboration with the customer’s IT team, and with senior management on a more strategic level.

RESULTS

Having started with firefighting issues with a 10-year old networking infrastructure that had fallen out of support and was not providing the performance required, with PAV’s assistance, the customer now has three major networking cores across its site.

This has resulted in a new, cloud-based networking infrastructure that is easy to manage. Cisco Meraki’s cloud dashboard and the support of the PAV team has made it straightforward for different stakeholders at the customer to monitor network performance and any vulnerabilities or issues.

The customer now has a 10gb environment with 3 x 10gb hubs. All access points have been refreshed, and full wireless capability is enabled across the site. The environment is being used to support WiFi based work on the customer’s 200 Citrix endpoints across the site, as well as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 applications.

The entire networking environment is now supported by PAV RESOLVE level 3 support service. This function was previously carried out by the customer’s in-house IT team. The PAV RESOLVE services delivers a reactive support function that provides centralised IT Service desk practice, deep technical support, third party management and onsite technical assistance when needed.

The customer also benefits from PAV MONITOR, which delivers proactive monitoring and alerting services to capture events which could otherwise lead to service outages. Combined with reporting and trending analysis, PAV MONITOR is able to identify and predict likely service affecting events before they occur.

Further to this the customer takes advantage of PAV OPERATE. This service provides continuity of technical skills for both planned and unplanned events. Acting as an extension of the customer’s in-house IT team and providing additional help when they need it, PAV carry out essential routine tasks and provide onsite and remote continuity of business IT functions. This includes proactive patch version management and adds, moves and changes that enable the customer’s IT team to focus on other areas of improvement and optimisation.