Microland enhanced network performance and availability for one of the clients through Consulting and Assessment

Overview

The customer is the world’s largest professional services organization offering services around financial accounting & tax auditing, consulting, and advisory services on accounting, strategy, operations, HR, and technology. They have a workforce of 300,000+ employees across over 700 offices in more than 150 countries globally.

Business Challenge

The customer had undergone a network technology transformation at its data centers and office locations. They had implemented the latest wireless infrastructure across their 750+ locations, transformed to SD WAN and brought in new tools to enhance automation opportunities. Despite the technology and tools transformation, the customer was facing challenges with network performance such as:

• Lack of proactive issue identification & resolution
• High MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve)
• Limited improvement in network performance & availability, user productivity, and user experience

The customer wanted to undertake an end-to-end Network Operations Assessment across LAN, WLAN, WAN, DC network, and perimeter Security infrastructure to identify gaps, root causes, and possible remediations.

Approach

Microland took a 3-step approach in the assessment and advisory on remediation to the customer:

Based on the gaps/issues identified, Microland provided a roadmap for operational transformation to the customer. The prioritized list of recommendations was divided into 3 phases:

Operations Hygiene – Most pressing problems that could be remediated in short term with minimal  intervention were targeted:

• Improve wireless performance through identified technical actions.
• Increase engineer productivity through configuration remediation.
• Standardization of policies for security & compliance adherence.
• Faster resolution & processing through centralized documentation.
• Efficacy of monitoring tools for proactive issue identification.

Operations Maturation – This area focused on deepening automation capabilities, and tool rationalization leading to operational standardization and efficiency:

• Develop & operationalize best practices through updated standards & templates.
• Rationalize tools with effective adoption and consolidation.
• Enhance automation through:

1. Integration of tools & ITSM for enhancing proactive issue identification & assignment.
2. Implementation of Microland Intelligeni Bots for automated resolution.
3. Automated approach for turnover to operations post refresh and transformation.

• Implement an analytics-to-action framework that co-relates network performance to user experience

Architectural Considerations – The final activity provided the customer with a roadmap of technology adoption to advance business and customer needs:

• Standardization of hybrid architecture
• Capacity augmentation and management
• Product & technology evaluation and adoption
• Cloud adoption acceleration

Outcomes

The customer has awarded Microland with a multi-year operations transformation project to remediate the gaps identified in the network operations and perimeter security management across its sites globally.