Kumba Resources has outsourced the management of their Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructure, including service delivery, to AST Networks, a business unit of the AST Group, for a period of three years.
Through this agreement, Kumba Resources will have one point of contact when dealing with the management and support of their WAN.
The previous WAN infrastructures did not cater for Kumba`s requirements to implement Quality of Service, Voice/Data convergence, Security and other features required to satisfy and adhere to Kumba`s business needs and drivers.
"To adhere to our business needs, we required a new WAN infrastructure that had guaranteed response times per application, enabling all users to have the same experience on the network per application at any given time," says Vickus Classen, Chief Technology Architect for Kumba Resources. "The WAN will also be integrated with our business continuity strategy, ensuring 100% WAN availability through alternate route installations."
"Kumba will benefit from AST`s extensive expertise in implementing this type of network," explains Lucien Oosthuizen of AST Networks. "AST has more than 60 service centres across South Africa and is therefore ideally positioned to deliver projects of this nature."
The network will also allow for the routing of voice traffic across the Wide Area Network by interfacing the various site network equipment and PABX systems. In addition, security mechanisms will be implemented to ensure the privacy of Kumba`s information on the WAN.
AST Networks will also implement VPN technology across the LAN and WAN infrastructures, by combining the features of both the new Nortel Passport 8600 infrastructure and the new WAN infrastructure.
The implemented solution to achieve VPN technology at Kumba is based on Nortel Networks Contivity Secure IP Services Gateways for the WAN infrastructure and Succession Media Gateways for the Voice Infrastructure, together with Optivity Telephony Manager for the management of the Voice infrastructure.
In summary, the new Connectivity WAN infrastructure will be installed according to the requirements specified by Kumba. The network connectivity will provide routing, firewall, bandwidth management, quality of service (QoS), encryption authentication and data integrity for secure tunnelling across managed IP network.
The new WAN infrastructure will cater for network bandwidth growth, link redundancy, network security requirements (tunneling and firewalls), network manageability, bandwidth management, QoS and transport of data, voice and video, as separate steam initially and later as converged data.
Share
AST`s intellectual capacity, its business model and strong customer base form the foundation for the Group`s integrated services solutions business. Ideally positioned as a leading technology solutions company and focused on selected industries, AST unlocks substantial value for its customers. The AST Group - a trustworthy and innovative ICT company.
Editorial contacts