Melbourne-based software developer Arrow Research Corporation has recently switched from its former telecommunications supplier to a Telarus Business Voice solution, a move driven by a requirement to save on call costs.
Telarus approached the accounting software maker in mid-2006 with a proposal that would save Arrow more than 40 percent on its local, national, mobile and international calls.
“Our decision to go with Telarus for our voice was purely cost driven,” said Murray Spokes from Arrow. We were already with Telarus for Internet and had previously experience with the company and have been happy with their SLAs.
“We analysed our current voice bills and made the decision that it would save us money if we switched across to Telarus,” he said.
The company’s data network also had some serious room for improvement, with Arrow needing to improve its design and upgrade its security while increasing bandwidth from its head office in St Kilda Rd and Toorak Rd in Melbourne, Victoria.
The existing 512Mb/s symmetric data link being provided by Telarus was not fast enough, while managing its own firewall and hiring a third-party organisation to provide regular security updates was becoming a headache, said Spokes.
As a result, Arrow decided to upgrade to a more robust private IP VPN & a co-location solution with a 2Mb/s symmetric link at the head office – with the potential to quickly and effectively upgrade to 4Mb/s later – effectively removing the performance bottleneck. And to ensure that the new bandwidth is used by the right applications, QoS has been enabled between Arrow’s sites.
Telarus also provided a remote access service to enable remote users to connect to Arrow’s VPN securely. Remote user sessions terminate on the Telarus Managed Firewall, however they are authenticated against Arrow’s own radius server, enabling Arrow to manage their own adds, moves and changes.
Co-location of a back-up server for FTP access, mail and web in a Telarus secure data centre also forms part of the solution.
Having a managed firewall service is extremely beneficial according to Spokes. The company has 25 roaming users working at offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and in the UK and New Zealand.
“Having a managed firewall service means that we don’t have to deal with any support issues which can be a hassle given the time difference between the UK and Australia,” he said.
A managed 24x7 service provides an excellent level of security, giving Arrow peace of mind that the firewall is being monitored and that all new security updates are applied as they are released.
"Telarus are pro-active and we don’t have to worry about it," he said.