Multi-Site SD-WAN Deployment | Intelligent Networx

SD-WANNetworkMulti-site

The Situation

A retail and hospitality group operating four venues across Sydney was paying for three point-to-point data circuits between head office and each venue. The circuits were expensive, and when one dropped, the venue fell back to a consumer-grade 4G connection that could not carry the POS backend.

The business wanted to roll out a centralised reservation system and a cloud-based inventory tool, but the existing network could not support the latency requirements. They asked for a quote on more point-to-point circuits; we recommended an SD-WAN instead.

The Problem We Found

Three leased lines between sites were costing more than the combined NBN bills for all four venues.
Each venue had a different router vendor, so no centralised visibility existed.
Cloud applications travelled over the internet without optimisation, causing inconsistent performance.
There was no automatic failover between the primary NBN and the 4G backup.

What We Did

We deployed a Fortinet SD-WAN fabric across all four sites. Each venue kept its NBN circuit as primary, with a 4G router as secondary. The SD-WAN automatically routed traffic over the best available link: cloud-bound traffic went direct to the internet, internal POS traffic went over the encrypted SD-WAN tunnel, and voice traffic was prioritised by application.

Head office got a single dashboard showing link health, application performance and security events across all four sites. We retired two of the three point-to-point circuits. The remaining leased line was repurposed as a backup for the head office site only.

Outcome

Two of the three leased circuits were retired, producing a predictable reduction in monthly carriage cost.
When one venue's NBN dropped for six hours during a copper fault, the venue stayed on 4G without losing POS or reservation access.
Cloud application performance improved because traffic was routed by link quality, not by default route.
Head office now has a single pane of glass across all four sites; branch visits for network faults dropped by two thirds.
The group can add a fifth venue by shipping a preconfigured SD-WAN device rather than provisioning a new leased line.

The business has since used the same fabric to roll out a guest Wi-Fi network across all venues, isolated from the POS VLAN.

Technical detail

The business had four sites connected by expensive point-to-point circuits, carrying internal traffic and backhauling cloud application traffic through head office. Each site had a basic router provided by the internet service provider. We replaced the routers with FortiGate 60F units and deployed an SD-WAN fabric across the four sites. Internal traffic now runs over encrypted IPsec tunnels over the internet. Cloud applications such as Microsoft 365, Xero and the job sheet system are routed directly to the internet at each site, rather than being backhauled through head office.

The SD-WAN automatically fails over between the primary NBN circuit and a 4G backup within ten seconds. We configured quality of service so voice traffic and job sheet updates take priority over general web traffic. The monthly carriage bill dropped by 38 percent in the first quarter, because the point-to-point circuits were replaced with internet circuits at a lower cost.

Outcome

The business owner now has a dashboard showing the status of all four sites, circuit utilisation and application performance. When a circuit degrades, we see it before a site manager calls. The site managers no longer report that "the system is slow" because the SD-WAN routes traffic intelligently. The project was delivered in four weeks, one site per week, with no downtime during business hours.