National Technical Systems (NTS), Inc., headquartered in Anaheim, California, was celebrating its 60th year in business. It provides testing, inspection and certification services to industry through a network of fully accredited testing laboratories and certification houses. The defense industry is one of its biggest customer segments because NTS has the equipment and expertise to meet rigorous military standards. NTS offers full lifecycle support to help companies bring products to market quickly and cost effectively, and operates two data centers and 28 branch offices across North America, Europe and Asia.

With two data centers and 28 branch offices across North America, Europe and Asia, WAN connectivity is a crucial component of NTS's operations. The company was saddled with legacy MPLS WAN connectivity that did not provide the dynamic bandwidth or application performance it required.

Beyond the performance shortcomings, the MPLS network cost more than competing technologies such as SD-WAN. It also locked NTS into a single carrier, which meant the company could not build carrier diversity or take advantage of better pricing from other providers.

NTS saw an opportunity to modernize its WAN, improving performance and reducing costs in the process. Its goal was to replace the legacy MPLS service with newer technology at a lower cost and reallocate the savings toward initiatives that improve the customer experience. But NTS needed more than WAN modernization alone. It wanted a WAN environment that reduced the IT staff's workload, professional project management to deploy a complex network, and advanced monitoring after deployment. That combination of requirements led NTS to Mosaic NetworX.

Mosaic NetworX proposed a WAN upgrade delivered as fully managed VeloCloud SD-WAN as a Service. The recommendation paired carrier-diverse dedicated internet access (DIA) with broadband as secondary connectivity and 4G LTE wireless as backup, giving NTS the network resiliency it was looking for.

The project ran in two phases. In phase one, Mosaic's engineering team analyzed data paths, routing and switching, traffic flows, firewalls, policy-based routing and access control lists, then established the routing and forwarding design, SD-WAN strategy and the cut-over and migration plan. Using the findings from this discovery, Mosaic performed the logical configuration in the VeloCloud Orchestrator.

Phase two covered pre-activation of devices and the logistics of shipping and coordinating local site installs across NTS's global locations. Once physically installed and connected to the upstream and downstream routers and switches, the SD-WAN devices came online and automatically received the settings applied during phase one; each VeloCloud Edge was then tested for connectivity to the Orchestrator for ongoing management and maintenance.

Mosaic was project lead for the entire implementation, including design, staging, physical installation, activation, testing and the MPLS migration, and coordinated installation of all internet access services and SD-WAN edge devices. Mosaic engineering configured a high-availability design at the two NTS data centers and single-edge configurations at all branch offices. Following deployment, Mosaic proactively monitors and manages all circuits and SD-WAN edge devices from its 24x7x365, US-based network operations center (NOC).

• More than $400K in savings expected over the three-year term
• Significant OpEx savings while reducing IT staff workload
• Carrier-diverse DIA, broadband and 4G LTE backup replaced a single-carrier MPLS network, ending carrier lock-in
• High-availability design at both data centers and single-edge configuration at every branch office
• Mosaic's 24x7x365 US-based NOC proactively monitors and manages all circuits and SD-WAN edge devices
• NTS describes its network as more stable, redundant and carrier-diverse since the June 2020 partnership