05 May 2018

SD-WAN technology has enabled the City & Guilds Group (C&GG) to achieve faster Office 365application response times leading to an increase in productivity and better collaboration between users in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

London-headquartered C&GG works with education providers, governments and major corporations to help shape and support skills development for employers in more than 100 countries. 

Its global team members primarily collaborate using Office 365applications but many remote users were struggling to access the group’s Microsoft platform which is hosted in Dublin.

The company’s CIO Alan Crawford says: “Our users in Wellington, New Zealand, saw delays between 10-15 seconds opening a standard Worddocument, which obviously was impacting productivity. We knew this would be a barrier to further collaboration and helping us reach our revenue goals. 

He says the group tried connecting to local Microsoft clouds but that did not solve the latency and application performance problems for users in the APAC.

After the deployment of Aryaka’s global SD-WAN, it’s claimed C&GG’s users saw dramatic improvements in application performance and could suddenly collaborate usingOffice 365in real-time.

“Our colleagues around the world were able to load their files to SharePointthree times faster,” says Crawford. “We experienced a 200x reduction in the time to open 10MB SharePoint files, and saw three times improvement in the time taken to upload 10MB files to OneDrive.”

Aryaka adds that because it delivers SD-WAN as a service, C&GG was able to deploy the solution in an hour.