Melbourne's Acurus helps update Bakers Delight to SD-WAN

Melbourne-based managed services provider Acurus has secured a contract win with franchise chain Bakers Delight to support the upgrade of its network to software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN).

The upgrade, which also involved Sydney's ASI Solutions for procurement and other services, covers the company’s 700 sites across Australia and its overseas branches, to allow its point of sale and digital customer loyalty transactions happen in real-time, as well as improve security, centralised management and overall visibility.

Fortinet was engaged as the vendor, rolling out Fortinet-60E devices and the network’s design, setup and configuration for Bakers Delight sites spanning Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.

Acurus complemented the rollout with its 24/7 helpdesk service working within Bakers Delight’s parameters and proposed timeline of 5 months.

“Running a three-vendor proof of concept across our production bakery network was a challenging approach, however the success criteria and learnings from the project enabled Bakers Delight to choose the right vendor and technology to provide a solid and secure foundation for today and for the future,” Bakers Delight PMO manager Dragan Panjkovic said.

“As always, the technical and delivery leadership the Acurus team demonstrated was critical to the success, including the design, approach and transition to the new global secured SD-WAN network.”

Acurus engaged with Bakers Delight on a market review and proof of concept, with the decision to go with an SD-WAN network cutting down the shortlist from 10 technologies to three. The chosen technologies were then run in parallel across 30 active bakeries within Bakers Delight’s network.

Acurus said the proof of concept delivered a full capability and commercial scoring matrix that found Fortinet as the best provider for the project.

Through the rollout, Acurus introduced SD-WAN policies, updated unified threat protection and centralised all security logging into a centralised FortiAnalyzer. The solution acts as a ‘single pane of glass’ network threat assessment capability across Bakers Delight sites.

The SD-WAN was also supported by managed services to allow Bakers Delight staff to focus on other parts of the business.

Acurus said it would continue to support Bakers Delight to ensure the secure delivery of existing POS, loyalty, wi-fi and operational services, as well as allowing for future services and applications to be implemented securely.