IX Telecom | Borderless Connectivity

Salma Oussous

Challenge

Our client, a financial service institution (FSI), was founded in 1966 and is driven by a passion for promoting economic and social development throughout Asia. They have approximately 31 field offices globally to support their mission with headquarters in Metro Manila, Philippines.

They have an impressive footprint in the Asia-Pacific region, providing assistance to developing member countries, public-private partnerships and the private sector through loans, grants and equity investments.

Since the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, our client has committed over US$17.5 billion to help its developing member countries mitigate the harsh impacts of COVID-19 and address vaccination needs. In addition, they have their eyes set on building a sustainable recovery from Covid-19 in Asia and the Pacific.

Our client sought to connect 30 sites spread across Asia back to the headquarters in Manila, Philippines. Most of the sites are located in third-world and developing countries, presenting a high level of difficulty in reaching and serving customers in those areas.

Connecting 30 global branches to the headquarters in the Philippines.
Providing connectivity in the most challenging and remote locations.
High-quality and stable connectivity to be implemented at all sites.

Our client was experiencing difficulties serving a section of their customers. They had local points of contact close to the customers. However, the location proved to be a bitter challenge. These sites were based in developing stable countries where connectivity and reliable infrastructure were difficult to come by.

Local internet service providers could only provide within the Philippines; therefore, it was necessary to engage a global internet service provider to cover their global sites.
Connecting different countries spread across Asia’s subregions was hectic: It was challenging to identify reliable networks in some developing countries in Central & West Asia, East Asia, Asia Pacific, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. These are due to vulnerable network infrastructure setup and poor maintenance.
Countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia were challenging to access at the time, frustrating the connectivity efforts to the sites in those areas. This also applied to their sites in Afghanistan during the war and the remote and unconnected islands of Fiji and Papua New Guinea.

Solutions

Hybrid connection. To mitigate the network issues caused by poor infrastructure, IX provided the client with a hybrid connection. We implemented our Global Internet connectivity solution and Managed SD-WAN solution as a total backup solution to their MPLS networks.
Given the client’s global sites, we provided them with a single point for the client. This approach makes it easier to consolidate monitoring.

Results

Keeping our client’s focus on the core of their business instead of worrying about connectivity and dealing with multiple providers across different countries, our solutions drove a major impact across their ecosystem:

30 global sites successfully connected back to the Manilla headquarters within a short period of time. Efficiency at its finest. Our solution managed to capture all the unconnected and difficult-to-reach locations.
Despite the connectivity challenges on the site locations, we set up a robust and efficient backup solution to the MPLS, resulting in higher performance and network stability.
Consolidating the processes saved costs for the client. They no longer had to deal with 30 different providers for similar global services across their sites. Instead, they had to deal with one touchpoint while we managed the other global partners and their output.