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Four years ago, PCL Construction, the largest construction contractor in Canada, went through a transformational shift to embrace technology and innovation.
In an industry known for maintaining its traditional approach to work, PCL wanted to embrace the cloud, data and analytics.
To implement this shift, however, the company needed to have a network backbone in place capable of delivering this innovation across an organization that had, at the time, nearly 200 active job sites and 40 permanent district offices across Canada, the United States, Australia and the Caribbean. With sprawling sites that increasingly required strong, reliable and secure network access, the existing solution just wasn’t cutting it.
That’s when PCL’s IT team began to explore software-defined, wide area networking (SD-WAN). At the time, SD-WAN was a new approach to network connectivity. One that ultimately contributed to 15 per cent budget savings for PCL over three years, improved application performance, and most importantly freed up the company’s valuable IT resources to focus on tackling strategic business opportunities.
| Executive Summary |
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| Customer Name: PCL Construction Industry: Construction Location: Edmonton, Alberta |
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| Challenges |
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PCL’s construction sites
increasingly required strong, reliable and secure network access.
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| Solutions |
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Cisco SD-WAN enabled faster, more reliable access to multicloud at job sites and district offices, improving worker productivity and freeing up IT resources for strategic, business critical projects.
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| Results |
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PCL Construction staked its claim as a technology leader in the industry, revolutionizing its network with Cisco SD-WAN and fully embracing a cloud-first approach.
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Cisco SD-WAN contributed to a 15% budget reduction over three years.
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PCL Construction has a more resilient network that prepared the company for future growth and expansion of its digital services.
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A network that couldn’t keep up
As PCL continued to grow, so did the demands on the network. From user growth to an increase in cloud services usage, network traffic across North America was growing exponentially yet passing through only three egress points -- in Toronto, Edmonton and Denver -- impacting performance and ultimately leading to slow speeds.
“We kept hearing from employees that our internet just wasn't keeping up with their work,” said Joel Godbout, Manager, Cybersecurity and Networking at PCL Construction. “That was the most common piece of feedback we would receive from job sites.”
But it wasn’t just employees on job sites languishing. The network’s instability was also coming at a high cost to PCL’s IT budget and taking a toll on its lean IT team: outages could mean spending a full day travelling, working onsite and moving VPNs, while bringing in a communications line to a new site could take up to six months.
It was clear PCL needed a solution that could provide more network connectivity, speed, and stability to keep 200 project sites and 40 district offices running smoothly in a cloud-first world. It also needed to enable the company to redirect IT resources to focus on how they could achieve their future-focused vision of construction. That’s when they turned to SD-WAN.
“If we were still trying to manage … network connections and overall WAN using traditional technologies and services, it would be unsustainable and unaffordable. Cisco SD-WAN was an enabler for our cloud journey. It added additional network availability and capability that just wasn't there before.”
–Chris Palmer, Senior Manager for Advanced Technology Services, PCL Construction
A flexible and agile solution for the future
Traditional WANs weren’t designed to handle the explosion of traffic and complexity that accompanies cloud adoption. SD-WAN on the other hand could improve traffic management and visibility, while providing PCL with the opportunity to modernize network management, reduce costs and secure traffic across broadband internet and into multicloud access.
“It was almost like an experiment in the beginning,” said Godbout. “This project was really driven out of the networking team and the timing was really fortuitous as we had just finished migrating 85 per cent of our on-premises data center to the cloud.”
The PCL team explored several providers and ultimately decided to go with Cisco SD-WAN, which had none of the technical hurdles or limitations they ran into with the other competitors in the space. Cisco also worked with PCL to create a flexible licensing model through a Cisco DNA Enterprise Agreement to fit both their present and future needs.
Godbout and his team went to work right away deploying the architecture and new hardware at key sites. Zero-touch provisioning and policy-based networking helped eliminate complexities in the process and simplified the changeover. Deployment was so straightforward, co-op students were able to assist and receive hands-on work experience in the process.
In three months, 90 per cent of the hardware was replaced with Cisco ISR 1100-4G Series routers. Every district office became a hub for the internet and had a direct connection to Azure, where all of PCL’s applications are housed, greatly improving speeds and reliability.
“The internet was right next door, for lack of a better term. You weren't going across the country to get to it,” said Godbout.
With SD-WAN in place, PCL also started to move away from more expensive managed communications services, such as MPLS, and replace them with commodity business lines managed via Cisco SD-WAN vManage. The savings were so significant, it allowed them add backup capacity at their permanent offices with less expensive service offerings like cable and DSL links, providing more availability and capability than they had before.
-Chris Palmer, Senior Manager for Advanced Technology Services, PCL Construction
Less time provisioning, more time supporting the business
Cisco SD-WAN was the enabler that allowed PCL to move away from a legacy mindset and fully realize their transition to the cloud. Reduced costs meant PCL could spend more on redundant feeds at district offices, adding additional resiliency in the event of a disruption.
“As we became a cloud-first company for our apps and services, we had to update our network strategy to simultaneously bring those services closer to our users while increasing the connectivity and performance of our network,” said Chris Palmer, Senior Manager for Advanced Technology Services at PCL Construction. “If we were still trying to manage those network connections and overall WAN using traditional technologies and services, it would be unsustainable and unaffordable.
Cisco SD-WAN was an enabler for our cloud journey. It added additional network availability and capability that just wasn't there before.”
Job sites now have the option for local internet or connecting via the district office in their area instead of being backhauled across the country through a handful of internet egress points. Ease of deployment means non-technical employees can set up new job site networks over a lunch break, using a preconfigured device and guide.
This freed up significant time for Godbout and his team: “We used to spend the bulk of our time managing and moving the traditional VPN links at our job sites,” said Palmer. “Now our SD-WAN solution handles the bulk of that work automatically and our team can focus on business critical priorities.”
PCL has also greatly benefited from increased business resiliency. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, as other organizations were scrambling to support a suddenly remote workforce, PCL already had the network and cloud infrastructure in place to support its workers. With a reduced need for IT teams to go onsite to set up networks, PCL was in a strong position to protect those working on job sites, reducing contact points and health risks to employees.
With the right networking foundation now in place, PCL is ready to embrace the next phase of its digital transformation. Godbout and Palmer are looking at how the industry leader can fully embrace IoT, analytics and data insights to drive the company forward.
“We want to break down the silos and build better connectivity to the technology that exists in our stack,” said Palmer. “We are going to be more purposeful in our decisions and IT deployments, and Cisco SD-WAN is the catalyst to get us there.”