A resilient network for 36 learning centres, built for the services that matter.

A national learning provider moving to the cloud

Rehab Group operates Ireland's National Learning Network across 36 training centres, supporting 5,500 students and staff. Its learners include people with disabilities, mental health conditions, cognitive and neurological conditions, and physical, sensory and autism-related needs, so dependable access to learning services sits at the centre of the organisation's work.

The 36 training centres in this story are one part of a much wider Rehab estate. Across RehabCare services, the National Learning Network, branches and head offices, the group operates more than 200 sites. This story focuses on the learning centres.

As its existing IT infrastructure approached end of life, Rehab Group moved to a centralised, private-cloud-hosted model. That decision made better use of central systems, but it changed what the network at each centre had to do.

One link between every centre and its services

Centralising the infrastructure made the wide-area network mission-critical. Each training centre relied on a single MPLS or DSL connection, and if that one link went down, the centre was completely offline. Many sites ran on as little as 1 to 2 Mb/s, far below what cloud-based learning services need to work well.

With a single point of failure sitting between every centre and the systems its learners depended on, the network had become the limiting factor rather than the enabler.

SD-WAN with resilient, higher-capacity connectivity

Edge7 Networks introduced SD-WAN to give every centre resilient, higher-capacity connectivity. Additional ADSL connections were added at each training centre and supplemented with 4G backup, so no centre depends on a single link. Edge7 Networks manages the whole network centrally, with all traffic encrypted to meet the security requirements attached to government funding.

A rock-solid network that gets out of the way

• Bandwidth transformed. Connectivity at each centre rose from as low as 1 to 2 Mb/s into the hundreds of Mb/s, enough to run modern cloud-based services.
• Outages eliminated. The regular outages and performance problems disappeared. When the MPLS provider suffered a major outage, the pilot site stayed online throughout.
• New services unlocked. With a dependable network in place, Rehab Group could roll out Office 365, Microsoft Teams for Education, audio-visual learning materials, and accessibility tools such as Microsoft Immersive Reader.
• Costs reduced. Moving to thin clients in place of desktops and laptops lowered capital expenditure, which matters in a government-funded environment.
• A platform to build on. The design set the foundation for SD-WAN across further locations and group-wide cloud-based telephony.

"Before, we had regular outages and performance issues on the network. With SD-WAN those problems have just disappeared. We now have a rock-solid environment, so we can focus on delivering feature-rich application services instead of the underlying plumbing."

Head of ICT, Rehab Group