Dublin Aerospace Group is benefiting from increased agility, flexibility, and cost efficiency as a result of a network solution provided by Three Ireland. Founded in 2009 at Dublin Airport, Dublin Aerospace has grown from an 18-person start-up to a company with a workforce of 500 across three sites in Ireland and the UK. In 2020 it acquired the former Flybe maintenance services site at Exeter Airport, and in 2021 it opened the doors at its state-of-the-art landing gear facility in Ashbourne, Co Meath.
“We pride ourselves on seeing opportunities and being agile enough as an organisation to grab them,” says Tony Conroy, Dublin Aerospace’s head of IT. “We opened two new facilities in the middle of the pandemic because we saw there were opportunities to bring the business to where we wanted, to offer better services to our customers.”
Consolidating all three sites on to one network was a logical step. Originally, the company expected to invest in point-to-point connections between the locations but discussions with Three opened up a different possibility: SD WAN technology.
“Dublin Aerospace is very typical of a lot of customers we have which have grown very quickly and organically,” says Three head of connected solutions Karl McDermott. “At a certain point they have to stand back and ask how they would design their systems if they were doing it from scratch. The company continues to grow quickly. It needs to adapt and move quickly in terms of adding new customers, new sites, new people and technologies and so on.”
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Having worked with Dublin Aerospace to understand the company’s needs, Three came up with the proposal for an SD WAN using Meraki technology. SD WAN gives businesses of all sizes greater flexibility that enables them to respond to business changes faster. The technology is also much more cost-effective since it doesn’t need extra investment in dedicated lines or more hardware.
“We wanted to benefit from what the internet can offer us in terms of secure connections, so having spoken to Three and their experts, and looked at the pricing model and the benefits we could gain, we came to a lightbulb moment in terms of the right solution not just for now but what we wanted going forward to develop our business,” says Conroy.
The Three SD WAN solution has delivered multiple benefits for Dublin Aerospace Group. Because the technology is software-based it’s more flexible. It works with the internet connectivity that businesses already have, whether that’s an existing broadband line or wireless 4G.
Conroy points out that this makes it much easier to move over to a backup connection if the internet connection to one of the sites is interrupted. “If you need to make a configuration change, or make services available on a different virtual network, it’s much quicker to do that in a software-based WAN than to manage a series of different hardware connections and configurations,” he says.
The technology also lets remote users connect easily to the company’s IT systems through a virtual private network, and it works seamlessly with the Microsoft Windows operating system that Dublin Aerospace staff use. This allowed the company to support its team to work off site during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The SD WAN is very easy for the customer to manage and maintain,” says McDermott. “It gives them visibility of what’s important on the network and the ability to prioritise the most important applications. It also reduces costs, particularly for the UK site, as there is no need for expensive international MPLS links.”
SDWAN is also very good at load balancing, he adds. “We always put in two links to a site – wired and wireless. Having two different transmission media means that they won’t both be hit by the same thing at the same time. You can use both links simultaneously to double the available bandwidth and even if one of the links goes down the ability to manage the system and prioritise applications means that mission critical operations won’t really be affected.”
It also facilitates future expansion, according to Conroy. “We’re moving to where we have closer interaction between Exeter and Ashbourne and as we grow to further sites it would have become harder to manage those individual connections if we didn’t have SD WAN. Three’s knowledge and understanding of what we’re trying to achieve has been critical. It’s a true partnership for us. It’s having a partner that we can build with, that we trust, with knowledge that we can tap into – and they understand our philosophy and what we’re trying to do.”