Located in Lake Villa, Ill., and founded in 1994, ID Label has been one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of barcode labels and asset tags, servicing thousands of global organizations in a variety of industries.
With its production facilities and headquarters in Illinois, as well as offices in Rhode Island and Seattle, the business has increasingly looked for network technologies that would not only connect its disparate facilities to its headquarters, but also prime the business for future growth.
ID Label had been relying on individual, open-source VPNs to connect its remote sites to its headquarters, but experienced frequent lags and dropped connections. In addition, its IT infrastructure consisted of multiple servers and network systems buckled together. This not only created workflow redundancies and inefficiencies, but it also would require significant time and resources to overhaul and modernize the infrastructure.
The business wanted a single interconnected network capable of flexibility and growth, while delivering reliable services for its employees.
ID Label partnered with Comcast Business to deploy an SD-WAN solution across its sites delivered on the ActiveCoreSM software-defined networking (SDN) platform. Comcast Business also installed high-capacity Ethernet- Dedicated Internet (EDI) at the company’s headquarters in Lake Villa.
ActiveCore is a carrier-grade, cloud-based platform that enables the orchestration of virtual network functions (VNFs) for centralized management, enhanced visibility and greater control. The ActiveCore SDN platform is complimented with a powerful digital experience and options to co-manage their solution with Comcast Business.
“Comcast Business installed all the infrastructure and manages it for us,” added Beshel. “Now all of our sites are within the same network and we’re able to mitigate lags or system outages.”
“As we’ve grown, it was apparent that our previous infrastructure wasn’t poised to sustain our growth, and it was unrealistic for us to redesign our network with the amount of work that had to be done, as well as the time and spend required,” said Danielle Beshel, director of IT for ID Label. “ActiveCore was the perfect solution, giving us the flexibility we need as we prepare the business for future growth.”
- Fully linked facilities and improved networking.
- Control over network design.
- Managed costs and enhanced employee productivity.
- Ongoing support for network services.
The flexibility of ActiveCore SDN has allowed ID Label to securely link its facilities around the country together, while EDI has helped with load balancing at the company’s headquarters. In addition, the ongoing support from Comcast Business has helped to mitigate some of the costs of overhauling ID Label’s digital infrastructure.
With the new capabilities ActiveCore brings to ID Label’s network, its IT team is working to re-engineer its infrastructure and remove system silos. This will ultimately help employees be more productive and eliminate redundancies in their workflows, such as having to double-enter data.
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