Greater Network Efficiency and Business Resiliency

The shift from working in the office to working at home has increased the number of devices, physical sites, and network traffic. IT departments, facing the daunting task of supporting hundreds – even thousands — of remote workers, have prioritized digital transformation projects to meet new demands, including:

Safeguarding network traffic
Providing security for every employee, everywhere
Reimagining safe and secure office spaces

CIOs/CFOs are turning to Black Box to help them define, design, and implement the future of work, including what business resiliency and digital transformation mean for their enterprises — and how to anticipate and capitalize on new market opportunities created by shifts in consumer and employee behavior.

Respond, Retool, and Reimagine

The pandemic accelerated the need for enterprises to modernize technology infrastructure and reimagine business, including accelerating data and digital platforms. Black Box can help enterprises design, deploy, and manage an optimized network for secure work — whether it’s remote, onsite, or hybrid.

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Secure Remote Worker

Give your enterprise secure network access, ensure data privacy, maintain control and enforcement policies, and protect against malware across an exponential growth in endpoints.

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Reimagined Workplace

Create and maintain a post-pandemic workplace that’s safe for boundless collaboration and true resiliency, including working from anywhere on any device with all policies and procedures in tow.

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Transformed Network

Design a resilient network environment and deploy it locally and/or globally, at one site or hundreds with consistent, fast, repeatable outcomes. Back it up with remote IT support, proactive maintenance and expert monitoring.

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Edge Networking Transformation

Black Box’s technicians specialize in core capabilities that can help your enterprise securely optimize its network for remote traffic; safeguard corporate assets; and build a phased plan that makes the most effective use of your existing environment and maps out the digital transformation journey.

SD-WAN

Connects enterprise networks — including branches and data centers — over large geographic distances providing centralized visibility, automation, and security.

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Wi-Fi 6

Supports a distributed mobile workforce wirelessly indoors and out (in converged management with 5G).

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Security

Integrated solutions include advanced security features, embedded automation, and intelligence tools to optimize and secure core and edge networks.

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Global Multisite Deployments

Manages installs in a timely, repeatable way across hundreds of sites around the globe.

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So Long 9-to-5

Attracting and retaining top talent in the new hybrid work environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the workplace and freed employees to work securely from home. This liberation from the daily grind has resulted in increased productivity, better work/life balance, and savings for employees and corporations. The benefits are so great that major corporations have announced plans to offer the perk of a hybrid work environment — one where employees work in a remote/in-office combination.

Read this guide to find out how your business can retool and reimagine your current legacy system to support an exponential amount of users, devices, and locations.

Get the Guide

Customer Success Stories

Black Box works with clients around the globe to address the unique challenges of edge network transformation, including these impressive success stories:

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Manufacturer’s Network Optimization Saves $3M

A large food manufacturer turned to Black Box for help optimizing its network, upgrading its unified communications system, and supporting them after installation. The result was enhanced security and efficiency that lead to a projected savings of approximately $3 million.

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Airport Foils Ransomware Attack

A large, North American, international airport, decided not to pay on a ransomware attack. Instead, they turned to Black Box. Our experts isolated the “infection,” procured new equipment, rebuilt the network, and reinstalled data from backups. The resulting value totaled over $2 million. Read Full Case Study.

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Hospital’s HIPAA Maintained Remotely At $1.2M Value

A Top 5 North American hospital network turned to Black Box to provide employees with secure, HIPAA-compliant remote access via cloud management. Results included potential reallocated hospital space, lower business risk, additional remote work opportunities, and a $1.2 million recognized value for investment in security devices. Read Full Case Study.

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Municipality Adds Secure, Remote Access; Gains $1.1M In Productivity

During the lockdown, a Northeast municipality employees couldn’t access files and applications remotely due to the absence of security features. Black Box provided a security platform that protected access to data for all users, devices, and applications. The result was a $1.1 million gain in productivity — plus millions saved by thwarting security breaches and ransomware attacks.

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Centralize 300+ Disparate Healthcare Networks

A growing healthcare consortium needed to simplify and consolidate 300+ homegrown field office networks for manageability, agility, and HIPAA compliancy. By leveraging Black Box's expertise and national service teams, they received a centrally managed, integrated SD-WAN network that mitigated risk, met all HIPAA requirements, and guaranteed 99.999% uptime. Read Full Case Study.

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Pandemic-Safe NOC for Miami Airport

When the pandemic hit, the Black Box team faced the daunting challenge of how to quickly transition Service-Desk Agents to a remote and socially distanced work environment, yet continue to provide mission-critical network and communications services with no disruption for the Miami International Airport. The team seamlessly cut over to a customized cloud-based solution and realized significant annual cost savings and a major reduction in call waiting and queue times. Read the full case study.

Why Black Box?

For almost 45 years, Black Box has helped clients in all industries and locations around the globe build, secure, manage, reimagine, and transform their networks and IT infrastructure.

Thanks to partnerships with leading manufacturers in digital communication and infrastructure, Black Box can help you shape a consumption model that will revolutionize your work ecosystem — and give your employees the flexibility to collaborate securely and intuitively anywhere, anytime, on any device.

So whether you’re a large healthcare enterprise or retailer, a small manufacturer, or somewhere in between, Black Box’s 2,500 team members have the know-how to help you engineer business continuity and innovation.

Business Resiliency and Digital Transformation

What does the modern workforce look like? Gain new insight and understanding from our Edge Networking experts as they help you make sense of secure hybrid work models, the post-pandemic office environment, and fluid business operation.

SD-WAN and Branch Networks: Made for Each Other

Jun 6, 2019 | Black Box Corporation

This is part two of our posts on SD-WAN technology. In the first post, we examine What is SD-WAN and Why It is So Important. In this post, we’ll take a look at why SD-WAN technology is becoming a real game changer for branch networks.

Must-Have Digital Transformation
IT professionals in dispersed enterprises face challenges unlike their counterparts in single-location, single-network organizations. It’s difficult enough to enable digital transformation at one site. Imagine if you’re charged with managing the networks at 100 or even 1000 sites, such as retail stores, bank branches, medical clinics, and hotel chains. Not an easy task. CIOs and IT directors often have to deal with multiple, disparate legacy networks, little or no IT staff at remote sites, budget cuts, increasing data demands, and poor network performance, all while trying to improve the external and internal user experience.

Digital transformation is now a must-have, not a nice-to-have business necessity. In an IDC study of 1000 IT decision makers, 98% agreed that moving to a next-gen network is critical to keep up with the needs of the business and end users.¹

“Digital transformation is quickly becoming the largest driver of new technology investments and projects among businesses,” said Craig Simpson, IDC research manager. “It is already clear from our research that the businesses which have invested heavily in digital transformation over the last two–three years are already reaping the rewards in terms of faster revenue growth and stronger net profits compared to businesses lagging in digital transformation initiatives and investments.”²

The question is how do you enable digital transformation across a dispersed enterprise with consistency, speed, and agility? It takes an IT team with cool heads, spines of steel, and SD-WAN technology in its toolbox.

The Growing Popularity of SD-WAN
The most popular path to digital transformation for enterprises with branches is SD-WAN. In 2015, Gartner predicted that 30% of enterprises would have deployed SD-WAN by the end of this year (2019). Today, IDC expects the market for SD-WAN to reach $4.5 billion by the end of 2021 with an annual compound growth rate of 40.4%.³

The move to SD-WAN is fundamentally changing how dispersed enterprises communicate. The market for branch office WANs is rapidly shifting from traditional networks with dedicated routers to enhanced SD-WAN and virtual platforms.⁴ No longer is a traditional MPLS network with a direct connection back to the headquarters the go-to technology. According to an IDG study, 92% of respondents said they were frustrated with the high cost and complexity of MPLS connections, especially for smaller branches. And depending on where branches are located, you may need to wait weeks or even months for MPLS circuits to be installed. Or if MPLS is not available in rural areas, you’ll have to find an alternative.

The Benefits of SD-WAN for Branch Networks
Today’s networks need agility and flexibility to accommodate enterprise-wide communications, Wi-Fi, IoT, security, as well as ever changing technology updates. SD-WAN can overlay existing networks and enable digital transformation with speed and consistency across the enterprise. Here are some of the main benefits inherent in SD-WAN deployments for enterprises with branches.

Simplification
One of the most significant benefits of SD-WAN, is how much easier it is to make enterprise-wide modifications. You can upgrade applications from one central dashboard in minutes rather than days. This has great implications for controlling security cameras, PoS kiosks, IoT devices, sensors, even HVAC systems at branches whether they are down the street, across the state, or even in another country. You’ll also find it’s much easier to add sites as needed.

Savings
One of the biggest headaches CIOs and IT directors face is how to improve technology while keeping a lid on costs. SD-WAN comes to the rescue. First, you’ll eliminate time-consuming and expensive truck rolls to repair, install, and update equipment. Next, traditional network architectures and equipment are expensive. On top of that you have MPLS costs which can run $600 per Mbps per month per line. Multiply that by how many locations you have and how much bandwidth you need and the monthly expenses can become unsustainable compared to broadband or LTE connections.

Bandwidth
This brings us to the ever increasing demand for bandwidth. For example, there are peak usage times in hotel chains when guests check in and out. Add on digital signage, security cameras, video conferencing, and PoS systems and you put more strain on the network. Solve the problem with SD-WAN.

Unlike traditional networks, SD-WAN can dynamically redistribute traffic over multiple pathways to ease the load on the network. Because SD-WAN supports multiple connections (MPLS, LTE, 4G, etc.), you can even choose how you want to transport mission-critical data versus non-critical data.

Expansion
Here’s the beauty of SD-WAN. Because it’s a software-defined technology, there is a reduced dependence on hardware making it easy to set up new locations and expand existing branches. You can bring new branches online in hours instead of days or weeks.

Security
With end-to-end encryption across the entire network, SD-WAN can meet compliance regulations to protect sensitive customer data such as banking information, purchase history, personal information, etc.

Visibility
SD-WAN provides end-to-end visibility in the network and application behaviors to ensure high-performance at branches across the enterprise.

Across multiple industries, SD-WAN is changing the way enterprises with branches are approaching digital transformation and network management.

To learn more about Black Box’s SD-WAN solution, take a look at SimplEdge. It’s our “network-in-a-box” solution for branches that includes everything from the cabling, SD-WAN, Wi-Fi, and security to all deploy, manage, and support services. For more information, call us at 855-324-9909, email us at contact@blackbox.com.

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure; Joe Skorupa, Andrew Lerner, Christian Canales, Mike Toussaint; Oct 2018
IDC Media Center; Businesses Will Spend Nearly $1.2 Trillion on Digital Transformation This Year as They Seek an Edge in the Digital Economy, According to a New IDC Spending Guide; April 24, 2019
IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure 2019 Predictions; Nov. 1, 2018
Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure; Joe Skorupa, Andrew Lerner, Christian Canales, Mike Toussaint; Oct 2018