Aquila Connects 60+ Locations Across Australia with Cato’s Global Managed SD-WAN Mobile Access Optimization • Firewall as a Service • Cloud Acceleration and Control • Secure and Optimized SD-WAN Internet VPN Becomes too Mike Zidaj, Complex and Limited for IT Manager Growing Company About Aquila Like many retailers, Aquila needed to connect its many stores; an Aquila manufactures Internet-based VPN sounded like the right approach. It was available premium quality footwear everywhere and didn’t pin the company to a carrier. And it was and is based in Melbourne, affordable, which made it well suited for connecting small retail outlets, Australia. The company some with only a single computer. used an Internet-based VPN to connect 60 retail But as the premium quality footwear manufacturer grew, Internet- locations, headquarters, based VPNs limitations became all too apparent. With 60 retail and warehouses. The locations, warehouses, a headquarters, and applications running in VPN also connected the Azure, Aquila’s VPN became incredibly complex. company’s database, “With each new store, we had to manually establish VPN connections payroll, and inventory with every other location. At first, it wasn’t that big a deal, but with more systems running as Azure sites, we ended up spending hours establishing the VPN. It just didn’t instances. Public Internet scale,” says Mike Zidaj, the IT Manager at Aquila. access was through the firewall in the office And since stores had to be manually connected, uptime was often headquarters. compromised. If the local staff didn’t properly connect the VPN then IT had to manually log in every Sunday to force a connection to enable inventory logging at the site. “At any one time, approximately 30 percent of our offices were showing offline at the headquarters,” he says. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 9