Bon Bon Buddies up with new Wan

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Confectionery company Bon Bon Buddies has upgraded its infrastructure with a new Wan covering the company's four sites in the UK and France.

The network was deployed by network services company SAS Group after Bon Bon Buddies needed to improve its communication links between sites. The majority of its IT infrastructure, including its email servers, was centrally managed in the UK.

The confectioners had recently rolled out Microsoft's Navision accounting software centrally and needed to ensure that its remote sites and home working staff would have reliable and fast access to the application.

SAS Group designed and project managed the installation of a BT MPLS Wan, This created a secure private network that linked Bon Bon Buddies' headquarters and distribution centres in Wales, its French office in Arras and distribution centre in Lille, as well as its remote workers.

The Wan is terminated with Cisco routers configured for assured forwarding to give the company's Navision application priority over other network applications. This allowed all employees to work on one system and database.

"Things can get very hectic here in the months leading up to the Christmas and Easter seasons," said Andrew Gorvett, head of IT at Bon Bon Buddies. "We need to be productive every minute of the day. It is therefore crucial that our communication links are up to speed and able to cope with these seasonal rushes, otherwise we could run into difficulties and potentially lose orders."

As the project got underway, SAS Group decided to retain the existing VPN infrastructure and reconfigure it as a failover network. It also installed Microsoft Exchange 2003 for email and a Cisco PIX firewall.

"When working on such contracts across multiple offices, this can become even more challenging as distribution processes must be integrated and accessible in real-time from all locations," said SAS Group chief Executive Charles Davis. "Tackling the challenge with a resilient private network goes a long way to solving these headaches."

Bon Bon Buddies is now planning to move its headquarters and deploy IP telephony following the successful roll out of the Wan.

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