A geographically diverse business runs on two kinds of connectivity: reliable links between its sites, and dependable access for the people working away from them. Tubular Steel needed both, without adding complexity for the teams keeping its plants and remote workers online.
Tubular Steel Inc.
A North American leader in precision welded steel tube production, Tubular Steel Inc. manufactures custom ERW mechanical tubing for the automotive, fitness, and furniture industries. It runs three plants (two in Toronto, Ontario, and one in Centerville, Tennessee) serving customers across Canada and the U.S., supported by a mobile sales force on the road.
SC//Connect secure SD-WAN solutions provide a cloud-managed platform for connectivity, traffic control, and performance optimization. Tubular Steel put two of them to work; one to strengthen the network across its sites, the other to connect its remote workforce.
The Challenge
Tubular Steel’s network had to serve two realities at once. Across three plants in two countries; two in Toronto and one in Centerville, Tennessee. The business needed reliable site-to-site connectivity and consistent application performance. The Centerville plant runs without dedicated on-site IT, so connectivity there had to be dependable and self-sufficient: a problem couldn’t wait for someone local to fix it. At the same time, a growing remote workforce of work-from-home staff and traveling salespeople needed dependable access from anywhere.
The existing setup wasn’t built for either, it was dated, hard to provision and use, and unable to keep pace with new applications. Remote users especially needed to stay online and reach applications and data as easily as if they were in the office, without wrestling with the details of their connection.
The Solution
Tubular Steel weighed traditional VPNs but was wary of their limitations. Instead, the company adopted the SC//Connect Enterprise SD-WAN solution to strengthen network reliability and application performance across its locations, while also implementing the SC//Connect Mobile SD-WAN access solution, a software-only service that delivers secure remote connectivity without additional hardware or complex configuration.
Together, the two solutions support both branch operations and remote users under a single, scalable approach to networking. On the remote side, the service is provisioned by email and, in Tubular Steel’s experience, installed in about five minutes, and the regular calls to IT that came whenever users couldn’t connect simply stopped. When a connection degrades, it fails over automatically to another available link, so people stay online without managing the handoff themselves, reaching corporate servers and cloud applications with an in-office-quality experience.
Since switching, we haven’t had a single call to IT for help with remote connections. Our mobile salespeople have rock-solid, secure connectivity on the road with the SC//Connect solution.— Ioan Pop, Tubular Steel Inc.
The Results
- No more remote-support tickets. After the switch, Tubular Steel stopped fielding IT calls for remote-connection problems, freeing the team to focus on higher-value work.
- Automatic failover, no interruption. On a customer visit, an unreliable Wi-Fi link failed over automatically to a phone hotspot, letting the employee finish the presentation with no break in the proceedings.
- Reliable across every site. Strengthened network reliability and consistent application performance across Tubular Steel’s plants in Canada and the U.S.
- One unified approach. Branch operations and remote users are supported under a single, scalable approach to networking, simpler to run today and to grow tomorrow.