Silver Peak's SD-WAN Makes Legal Push

Sometimes value shows up in unexpected ways, and though these aren't always what people had in mind for a product when it was created, it takes on a new life of its own.  Both Coke and Pepsi started life as medicines. Now, legal firms are discovering a new value in software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) systems as seen with Silver Peak (News - Alert)'s Unity EdgeConnect system, who recently found a new client in the Goldberg & Osborne law firm.

The law firm discovered that the technology inherent in the Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN system allowed for ready connection across a large number of branch offices. Since Goldberg & Osborne had fully 21 such offices to its credit across the entire state of Arizona, that was the kind of test that might balk a lesser SD-WAN. Silver Peak, however, delivered a technological marvel that allowed the firm to readily pass information from one branch to another.

Silver Peak's system is now said to be part of a larger effort to modernize the firm's information technology (IT) systems, allowing the company to activate a complete remote disaster recovery operation as well as a colocation data center. This provides an extra technological help in the event of emergency, as long as the emergency isn't so massive it covers the entire state of Arizona.

Goldberg & Osborne previously turned to a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) system to connect its various offices, a legacy system that was not only proving increasingly costly, but was also showing its age as a legacy system often does.  Reports note that the law firm expects to save around $120,000 annually on connection costs by using this new technology.

Throw in a variety of extra features now available to the firm like voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) access capability, the Unity Orchestrator system to better segment applications with a focus on service levels, and the Citrix (News - Alert) Multi-Stream ICA that could select the best transmission path for communications by measuring latency across the network and the technology speaks for itself.

We've already seen how SD-WAN systems provide value for widely-dispersed operations that aren't so readily connected by normal means. Though we may not think of a law firm as the kind of company that can benefit from a SD-WAN system, there's very little about it that wouldn't qualify. Indeed, many other common operations—doctors and dentists, car mechanics and the like—might well want to look into this technology too to see how it can work for others.

Silver Peak's SD-WAN system is a powerful new option in the field, and for any firm that has several different locations in a wide area, it may be just the tool that's needed to keep everyone connected.