The client is a healthcare benefits company described as a trusted expert in compliance, government contracts, customization and fringe benefit management under various healthcare acts and legislation. Its corporate office is in California and its production facility is in Texas. The company runs proprietary mission-critical WAN applications, including interoffice VoIP, processes medical claims that must be completed promptly to facilitate care, and hosts a secure website where clients access and manage their benefits in real time.

Shared WAN applications between the California and Texas offices must be available 100% of the time. Timely processing of medical claims facilitates medical care, including critical life-saving treatments. "If we cannot provide answers to client or health provider inquiries due to a WAN outage, it could impede critical medical treatments," said the company's IT Director. External availability is just as critical: if the client benefits website goes down because of a WAN outage, clients and their employees lose the ability to manage their benefits.

Each location had experienced intermittent WAN failures and poor total bandwidth throughput, which the Director said cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity each day. Regulations such as HIPAA and COBRA add pressure, since at their core they deal with the availability and security of medical and financial information. The company must notify participants of their COBRA rights within 72 hours of leaving their jobs or they lose eligibility for continued medical treatment.

The company wanted to update its WAN infrastructure to build fault tolerance, increase bandwidth, secure data transmission and achieve site failover between its two locations.

The company turned to FatPipe to resolve the speed, reliability and business continuity issues on its WAN connections. It installed FatPipe MPVPN units with the IPSec and QoS add-ons at each location, providing redundancy, additional security, more speed and greater data route control.

At each site the MPVPN aggregates three connections from different ISPs: a 250 Mbps satellite link, a 2 Gbps fiber link and a 1 Gbps Ethernet link. Using MPVPN's core redundancy, security and bandwidth optimisation features together with FatPipe Multi-line QoS, the company balances load between the sites while maintaining a consistent real-time replication system, which turned one of its offices into a hot failover site.

The company previously ran VPN tunnels from a popular VPN manufacturer but switched to FatPipe's proprietary IPSec, which the IT Director described as robust and less vulnerable to attacks from outside hackers. The improved control over data traffic and increased security help the company comply with the healthcare acts and legislation it works under, and FatPipe ensures delivery of time-sensitive notices such as COBRA rights communications by removing concerns about WAN security, speed and reliability.

According to the Director, "installation was a breeze and configuration was a cinch." Easy installation and maintenance let the company focus on customers with the peace of mind that it has a superior WAN business continuity plan.

• Three ISP connections aggregated at each site through FatPipe MPVPN for redundancy, speed and route control
• One office converted into a hot failover site with consistent real-time replication managed by FatPipe QoS
• High WAN reliability now supports the company's mission-critical web-based and VoIP applications
• Greater control over data traffic and stronger IPSec security support HIPAA and COBRA compliance
• Resolved the intermittent WAN failures that had cost thousands of dollars in productivity each day
• Installation described as "a breeze" and configuration "a cinch" by the IT Director