World Kinect, a leading global energy company, sells and distributes aviation, marine and land fuel products, as well as energy management solutions, to clients across a range of industries in over 200 countries worldwide. The Fortune 500 company is headquartered Miami, Florida with employees across the U.S., Latin America, Europe and Asia.
When World Kinect embarked on a company-wide digital transformation initiative, transforming their core on-premise architecture was the critical first step and foundation to achieving their vision of a cloud-based end-to-end architecture. The company’s MPLS network was unreliable, expensive and time-consuming to maintain across their global sites. Their IT organization determined they needed a unified, cloud-based architecture to deliver the company’s critical SaaS applications, like Microsoft Office365, Box, Slack, Zoom and more, without increasing costs or complexity of management.
“From a network performance standpoint, I view the benefits in two areas: one is redundancy. We could never have the level of redundancy with MPLS that we now have with Aryaka. The second is the amount of incidents. We’ve seen a 90% reduction in incidents since deploying Aryaka.”
After determining that Aryaka SmartServices, Aryaka’s fully managed SD-Wan solution plus last mile management services, met all the requirements, World Kinect deployed the solution to 75+ global sites to achieve a unified, cloud-ready network.
“We wanted to consume our network in the same way we consume the cloud, which is an as-a-service model, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure the company we worked with was culturally aligned to who we are and who we want to be. Those are the two core reasons we chose Aryaka.”
–
After deploying Aryaka, global application performance improved, network redundancy improved and the company decreased their network TCO by 25% – a win-win for the organization. Yet when the global pandemic began in 2020, World Kinect, like most organizations, was challenged to transition a fully on-site organization to a fully remote workforce. The company’s traditional VPN was slow and unreliable. After deploying Aryaka Private Access, a secure managed VPN-as-a-Service solution, latency for remote workers decreased by 27.5% and, anecdotally, remote users noted the positive experience of having fast, uninterrupted connectivity. As a result of this shift, the company has embraced a hybrid work environment, viewing it as the future of work and Aryaka as an important tool to enabling that vision. By moving to Aryaka’s fully managed SD-WAN solution, World Kinect plans to be MPLS- and datacenter-free by the end of 2021.
Lastly, the move to a managed service has proved to be a major benefit saving both time and money for the IT organization.
“It’s not just the technology, it’s the support. If we have a circuit that’s down, Aryaka supports us end-to-end by reaching out to the ISP, managing the issue and letting us know when it’s been solved. This helps us put the pressure aside and focus on other priorities. Aryaka augments our team, allowing us to deliver on more strategic outcomes with less headcount.“
– Walter Aragon, Sr. Manager of Global Networks
