Collaboration for Healthcare Client
Client Background and Issue -- This large health care practice needed to reduce travel between locations, improve the productivity of its doctors and staff -- and, at the same time, save money and promote greener IT. They were also expanding the practice and needed to communicate effectively between all five of their locations. One location was to receive all incoming calls and then transfer them appropriately to the proper office location. Doctors working at different offices needed to receive their calls, regardless of which office they were located at. Incoming call volume needed to be monitored to ensure that staffing levels were adequate. Incoming messages needed to be recorded and accessed simply by doctors that were out of the office.
ATSG Implemented Solution -- ATSG designed and deployed a Cisco Unified Communication Manager with IP Phones at the five healthcare locations. This resulted in reduced overall IT costs, including cost of equipment and cost of management of one phone system instead of five. With the installation of Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX), the healthcare provider was able to collect information and generate reports on the volume of daily incoming calls. After a short monitoring time, they were able to size the staff properly to handle all the calls. Now that the whole practice has one phone system -- rather than five individual ones -- interoffice phone calls are free. Calls can be picked up and transferred to any location, based on the dialing plan. With Cisco's Extension Mobility capability, doctors can work from any location and can be reached at one phone number. Unified Communication allows the entire staff to see all their media messages in one convenient location -- their e-mail inbox. When doctors are away from the office, they take advantage of the Jabber client that allows them to receive their Instant Messaging, Presence, Conferencing, or Video on any of their smartphone or tablet mobile devices.
Client Benefit -- This unified communications collaboration solution not only increased customer service by allowing response to the healthcare client's incoming calls within a couple of rings, it allowed the staff to move the calls to any one of their five locations. Staff could now reach doctors quickly, because they only had one number to dial and the call would be delivered to them wherever they were within the practice. Unified communication gave everyone faster response times, allowing staff and doctors to make quicker decisions and provide better patient care. Staffing was reduced by better understanding their incoming call flow, which saved the practice money. Doctors are now as productive out of the office as they are in the office.
Data Center for Financial Services Client
Client background and Issue – At this large financial services firm, the consumed real estate and power -- and the required support -- of their data center were much too high. Also, they were limited to manual switchover processes in disaster recovery scenarios. They wanted to use virtualization to consolidate their servers and network infrastructure. The wanted to implement 10GB and 40GB Ethernet solutions to achieve hot data center resiliency and complete Data Center Interconnects (DCI).
ATSG Implemented Solution -- ATSG designed and deployed a fully redundant core infrastructure utilizing Cisco's Nexus 7000 platform in the aggregation layer and Cisco Nexus 5000 and Nexus 2000 fabric extenders in the access layer. Core routing was extended up to the Cisco ASR platform with ECMP (Equal-cost Multi-path) connectivity to the Nexus 7000s. ATSG, utilizing Cisco's OTV and LISP technologies, extended the data centers across disparate locations -- allowing full site-to-site LAN extensions for live migrations, utilizing VMware vMotion technologies. This design allowed the client to consolidate both data centers over disparate locations into one operational datacenter, without the legacy issues of past DCI technologies.
Client Benefit -- This solution not only increased bandwidth to 10/40 GB Ethernet in the data centers, but also provided a complete consolidated data center over two disparate locations -- thereby treating their server environment as if they were connected to one LAN. It also gave them the redundancy of having each data center in a different geographic location to provide complete resiliency.
Security for Education Client
Client Background and Issue -- This education institution client needed assistance in managing the thousands of mobile devices (BYOD) that their students and faculty were connecting to both their wired and wireless networks every day. They needed a way to securely and efficiently manage these mobile device clients, without becoming a burden to the students or the IT Department.
ATSG Implementation -- ATSG designed and implemented a Cisco ISE solution for this client with wired and wireless integration. A single appliance combined Authentication, Profiling, Posture Assessment and Provisioning. The student laptops were able to login to the network securely utilizing 802.1x EAP authentication -- after meeting specified anti-virus and software patch requirements that were required by the Security Policy. If the student's equipment did not meet the requirements, they were given limited Internet-only access, so they could make the necessary remediation to gain access to the network without impacting other users or systems. The management software -- Cisco Prime Network Control System -- correlates user identity with policy through a single view, simplifying BYOD User, Device and Application Monitoring.
Client Benefit -- The Cisco ISE security management solution helped relieve the education client's inundation of Help Desk tickets every time new students tried to login to the network. This solution also provided a more secure network that was less prone to attacks over the LAN. It also reduced the IT Department man-hours spent cleaning up virus and malware attacks. The detailed reporting from the appliance allowed the network team to appropriately plan for growth, since they could monitor the active wireless/wired connections from a single appliance.
Infrastructure for Media & Entertainment Client
Client Background and Issue -- Our client, an international media and entertainment company with multiple locations across every continent, was suffering from sluggish network performance that impacted their end-user experiences on voice, video and application response time and usability. The end-user had very little visibility into what applications where running on their network and the impact of those applications. ATSG was asked to provide a network assessment and then implement a useable, scalable and robust international network with high availability between each office and their data centers on each continent.
ATSG Implementation -- ATSG designed and deployed a fully-redundant high speed/ low latency international MPLS network -- with quality of service (QoS) for each office and data center -- utilizing various Cisco ASR and ISR routers. Alongside the high-speed MPLS network, ATSG implemented a fully meshed DMVPN network with cisco 2900 series ISRs for additional redundancy. ATSG installed an ASR 1000 that used Application Visibility Control (AVC) to monitor, tune and improve the quality of the end-user experience.
Client Benefit -- This media & entertainment infrastructure solution increased bandwidth between all locations locally and abroad – and also provided the necessary QoS to ensure voice and video calls would be the quality they were accustomed to. The fully meshed DMVPN ensured that every site and resource was always available in the event of a WAN failure. The Application Visibility Control (AVC) provides visibility into their network and the ability to run reports on application usage. This allows for future capacity planning, adjustment of QOS policies, and helps to improve their operation through network optimization.
