CASE STUDY
Stagecoach Group is a leading multimodal
UK public transport company,
with operations in England, Scotland
and Wales. It operates bus, coach and
tram services in regulated and deregulated
markets. Stagecoach is the UK’s biggest bus
and coach operator, with 24,000 employees
serving three million passengers every day
across 100 major UK bus depots.
The challenge:
Stagecoach needed to be able to support
both business growth and its increased
adoption of cloud-based technologies.
This required a connectivity solution that
could be easily deployed to existing and
new sites. The need for a software-defined
Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solution was
clear to ensure Stagecoach could progress
with its cloud-first strategy. Its strategy
includes a combination of Software-as-a-
Service (SaaS) adoption and preparing core
systems for the cloud, both of which require
application routing control and extensive
access to bandwidth.
Staying online is hugely important for
Stagecoach, its employees and its customers,
but using legacy infrastructure meant there
was no way of automatically monitoring
the entire estate. This resulted in the IT
team having no visibility into knowing if or
when a site was down, or if it was struggling
for bandwidth.
In turn, this could cause extended periods
of downtime if not addressed, as the onsite
teams had to manually check each site
minute-by-minute and the IT support team
would only find out about any downtime
once they were notified.
“If the network goes down, we can’t
schedule buses or update customers on
whether their bus is coming,” said Graham
Moore, Group Chief Information Officer at
Stagecoach. “It’s of paramount importance
in today’s digitally-driven world that our
customers using the app – which tells them
when a bus is due to arrive – can expect
this to be a reliable and consistent service.
Because the app works on a national basis
but takes a feed from every machine on
every site and every bus, the network going
down on one site removes the transitions of
ticket data for those buses, leaving essential
functions blind.”
Moore added: “We also needed to adapt
quickly in the face of the COVID-19
pandemic, to be able to remain connected
and collaborative from remote locations.
We had only just rolled out Office 365
and not yet fully harnessed its capabilities.
Implementing appropriate processes
and technologies for effective remote
collaboration was high on the
Stagecoach agenda.”
The solution:
To drive forward its Digital Transformation
plans, Stagecoach has replaced its legacy
WAN infrastructure with a new
SD-WAN based architecture provided
by Node4.
IMPLEMENTING
APPROPRIATE
PROCESSES AND
TECHNOLOGIES
FOR EFFECTIVE
REMOTE
COLLABORATION
WAS HIGH ON
THE STAGECOACH
AGENDA.
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