Managed VPN Solution

Network Platforms specialises in Managed VPN solutions. When designing an inter-branch Virtual Private Network (VPN), the following needs to be taken into consideration:

• The applications that your employees need to access remotely.
• The amount of employees that require access at each branch or external access.
• Each branch's connectivity, the percentage utilised throughout the day (your ISP should be able to supply you with the relevant graphs), and the equipment used.
• Whether employees have unconditional access to the internet, white listed site access, blacklisted site access, no access or unlimited access. Whether international connectivity is required or local only.
• Whether your company utilises the services of an IT company to maintain internal infrastructure.
• Whether the access to communication services is critical for business operations.
• The amount of inter-branch traffic that is required and what percentage of line utilisation this will take.

After these general aspects have been taken into account, a good understanding of communication redundancy and backup plans should become relevant. In order to prioritise communication applications Network Platforms will provide solutions to the above problems as follows:

Applications required for remote access

Based on the information you provide, Network Platforms will determine how much bandwidth is required for each particular application and will ensure the bandwidth implemented will be sufficient and highly available.

Employee branch/external access requirements

After analysing your needs, we will help you to calculate the required data communication line sizes needed for linking you to the head office.

External connectivity

We will analyse your current communications solutions, and in some cases we will utilise existing connectivity, which reduces the roll out period. We will however always replace the equipment with tried and tested equipment.

International communication usage

We can use local only accounts at the remote branches so if the internet breakout is done at HQ or if no International access is required, it will reduce the monthly costs of bandwidth.

An IT company maintaining internal infrastructure

We will advise you on how to maintain your internal infrastructure as well as maintained internal infrastructure which will allow for high uptime of communication systems. Problems that may arise include viruses, unstable servers etc.

Critical communications

We will use this information to determine which primary and secondary connections to utilise.

Branch traffic

One very cost effective option we offer is to implement your own private ADSL infrastructure, this architecture is reserved for companies that either require high security or have a lot of traffic and require good contention ratios.

Advantages of our managed VPN Service:

• 24 hours monitoring of all connections with SMS and email notifications. Over and above monitoring the physical connection, we monitor the VPN, including latency and if there is a spike in latency for a specific period we are also notified.
• We offer backup connections where possible, signal dependent and depending on bandwidth required for the application.
• We have replacement equipment in stock to replace any equipment failures and dispatch the equipment at our pre-configured expense.
• We have systems in place that automatically backup the configuration of all communications equipment.
• We offer IPC, Diginet, ATM or Fibre connectivity depending on the requirement and the network topology.

If we utilise Diginet (leased Lines) then we reserve this for VPN traffic only with no internet break out - the advantage of using Diginet over ADSL at Head Office is the following:

• If the Diginet line fails, there will be a predefined time in which the line must be repaired - ADSL does not have this.
• The upload and download speeds are the same and guaranteed, where with ADSL, the upload and download speed vary. The upload speed comes into play with a VPN and is not guaranteed.

In this topology we would utilise the ADSL lines for failover while the Diginet is being repaired.