Headquartered in London, the City & Guilds Group works with education providers, governments, and major corporations to help shape and support skills development for employers in over 100 countries. Team members of the company are similarly scattered around the world and primarily collaborate using Microsoft Office 365 applications.

However, many remote users were struggling to access the group’s instance of Office 365, which is hosted in Dublin. For example, it could take over 37 seconds to open one file from the corporate SharePoint drive. Besides leading to a high number of user complaints, the performance issues limited adoption of Office 365 for global employees.

"Our users in Wellington, New Zealand, saw delays between 10-15 seconds opening a standard Microsoft Word document, which obviously was impacting productivity. We knew this would be a barrier to further collaboration and helping us reach our revenue goals," said Alan Crawford, CIO for City & Guilds Group. "It’s important to ensure the benefits we provide through group-wide application deployments are equally well received throughout every geographical region we serve."

"City & Guilds Group tried connecting to local Microsoft clouds, but that did not solve the latency and application performance problems for users in the Asia-Pacific region," Crawford added.

In their search for an answer, City & Guilds Group ultimately selected Aryaka’s global SD-WAN.  Because Aryaka delivers SD-WAN as a service, City & Guilds Group was able to deploy the solution in an hour. Users saw dramatic improvements in application performance and could suddenly collaborate on Office 365 in real time.