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A South Australian construction and civil services group — around 120 staff across five sites including a head office in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, two regional depots, and project office locations — came to Tyto with a persistent and costly problem: unreliable network connectivity that was undermining their ability to operate effectively across sites.
The business had grown through organic expansion and the acquisition of a regional civil contractor. Each site had been connected using a different combination of ADSL2+, consumer-grade NBN, and legacy MPLS links inherited from the acquired business. The result was a patchwork of connectivity with no central visibility and no consistent failover capability.
The pain points were clearly documented by the time Tyto was engaged:
The catalyst for engaging Tyto was a three-hour outage at the largest depot site, during which crews could not access the cloud-based job management system and had to revert to paper-based processes. The direct and indirect cost prompted the managing director to make network reliability a capital priority.
Tyto’s approach began with a network discovery and assessment across all five sites — documenting existing connectivity, hardware, and topology, and benchmarking actual performance against what staff were experiencing day to day.
The assessment confirmed the core problem was not internet plan speeds. The fundamental issue was the absence of intelligent traffic management, automatic failover, or centralised visibility. Sites were operating as isolated networks with no coordination and no monitoring.
Tyto designed and deployed a Cisco Meraki SD-WAN solution across all five sites in three phases:
Phase 1 — Head office and primary depot (weeks 1–4). The Adelaide head office and highest-traffic depot were migrated first. Each site received a Meraki MX appliance as the SD-WAN gateway, with dual uplinks — a primary business-grade NBN or fibre service and a 4G LTE backup link. Failover is automatic and measured in seconds. Meraki’s centralised dashboard provided real-time visibility across both sites from day one.
Phase 2 — Regional depots and project offices (weeks 4–8). The remaining three sites were migrated using the same architecture. Regional depots received NBN Business Plus with 4G backup. Project offices — which relocate regularly — were provisioned with Meraki Z-series teleworker gateways paired with SIM-based connections, enabling the network to be redeployed at new project sites within minutes of arriving on site.
Phase 3 — Security hardening and monitoring (weeks 8–10). With the SD-WAN fabric in place, Tyto applied Meraki’s integrated security features: content filtering, application-aware traffic prioritisation ensuring Microsoft Teams calls and ERP traffic take priority over general browsing, and IDS/IPS threat detection. The full environment was brought into Tyto’s 24/7 managed monitoring with automated alerting and monthly reporting.
Three months after deployment, the results were measurable and clearly attributable to the new infrastructure.
Network-related outages dropped from an average of four incidents per month across the estate to zero visible service interruptions — because every failover event was handled automatically, with staff unaware that anything had changed. The monitoring dashboard logged seven primary link failures across all sites in the three months following deployment; none resulted in visible disruption to the business.
The project office mobility capability was validated immediately: the first site relocation after deployment had networking operational within 20 minutes of unpacking at the new location.
Staff-reported IT issues — specifically complaints about slow cloud applications and Teams call quality — fell by more than 60 per cent in the first 60 days, attributable to application-aware traffic prioritisation ensuring business-critical traffic received appropriate bandwidth at all times.
The internal IT coordinator described the operational shift as significant: rather than investigating site outages reactively, they now had a single dashboard showing the health of every site at a glance and received alerts only when action was genuinely required.
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) intelligently manages network traffic across multiple connections — primary internet links and failover paths — from a centralised management platform. Unlike a standard internet connection, SD-WAN automatically detects when a link fails or degrades and redirects traffic to an alternative path without manual intervention. It can also prioritise critical business applications over general internet traffic to ensure consistent performance regardless of overall usage patterns.
For a business with five sites, a well-managed SD-WAN deployment typically takes eight to twelve weeks from initial assessment through to full deployment and monitoring. The timeline depends on the number of sites, the complexity of existing infrastructure, and hardware lead times. Deployments are staged so each site continues to operate normally during migration — there is no requirement for a business-wide cutover window.
Modern SD-WAN platforms such as Cisco Meraki include integrated security features — content filtering, intrusion detection and prevention, and application-aware traffic policies — that cover the firewall requirements of most small and medium businesses. For organisations with more complex security requirements, SD-WAN can complement a dedicated next-generation firewall rather than replace it. Tyto assesses each environment individually and recommends the appropriate combination for that business.
Facing a similar challenge? Talk to the Tyto team on 1300 070 565 or visit tyto.net.au
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