WAN Optimization Case Study – Mowi

WAN Acceleration for Microsoft 365

Mowi is the largest producer of farm-raised salmon in the world and is present in 25 countries across the globe. They have deployed Replify’s WAN Optimization software throughout a large portion of their organization to improve the application user experience for over 14,500 of its employees around the world.

The Replify Accelerator software is hosted by Mowi in Microsoft Azure. They have Accelerator appliances deployed on SD-WAN devices at the edge. They also have Accelerator clients installed directly on end user machines. These accelerate Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 and Infor M3 ERP along with some other internal applications.

Mowi decided to deploy Replify’s Intelligent Caching Engine to reduce the amount data transmitted across the WAN resulting in improved user experience and application responsiveness.

Replify is delighted to provide its WAN Optimization technology to Mowi. In particular, the mobile client part of our software that can be installed on end user devices has proved invaluable to Mowi given the geographically dispersed locations of the large workforce and the networking and infrastructure challenges this creates.

Rozy Corry – CEO at Replify Ltd

The Microsoft 365 Challenge

Having such a widespread presence, Mowi depends on local internet infrastructure to connect their employees to the company’s many cloud and datacenter-hosted applications. The bandwidth and quality of links provided by the local infrastructure varies greatly. As Mowi is also consolidating their application portfolio and have started moving from local applications to global applications, hosted in their datacentre in Europe, they see their applications’ performance degrading and see employees experiencing high latency and frequent congestion on their links.

Mowi was actively looking at technology to improve overall network health and application performance for their employees. One of the larger considerations was to do this without additional hardware. Besides the first consideration, Mowi set a firm requirement, where TLS optimization was essential towards adopting any product as a solution as the majority of Mowi’s corporate applications are HTTPS. Mowi needed a technology to overcome these issues regardless of the quality of a user’s connection or whether the data was TLS.

The Solution

Replify’s Mobile Accelerator Client was a key enabler for Mowi. With no hardware needing to be rolled out to remote sites, the client was quickly and easily deployed to hundreds of devices, without the need onsite visits, using SCCM and InTune. On the datacenter side, Mowi deployed Replify Virtual Appliances to which each of the clients connected. This job was simplified by Replify’s optional Enterprise Manager component that consolidates licensing, reporting and distribution of acceleration functions among clients in a deployment.

With the simple configuration complete, Replify’s Intelligent Caching Engine was ready to work. The Client and VAs combined to perform the 4 key functions of Replify’s Intelligent Caching Engine: compression; data deduplication; protocol optimization; and TCP optimization. Replify is an ideal solution for Microsoft 365 Acceleration.

The Results

The results were dramatic and rapid. Employees reported improved application responsiveness while the reduction in bandwidth consumption was in excess of 40% for Microsoft 365 and over 85% for the Infor M3 ERP. This freed up bandwidth on the links, making better use of the capacity available.

This was, by far, one of the smoothest rollouts with a major impact to end users. The software did EXACTLY as advertised – but all in the background – the only thing the end users saw was faster applications. At present, we have offloaded nearly 40% of Office365 data, and over 85% of corporate applications

Stephen Budgeon – Applications Specialist at Mowi