A retail chain rolls out hybrid SD-WAN to 120 stores in four countries
The Customer - A multi-brand retail group operating 120 stores, three distribution centres and two head-office sites across India, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and the United Kingdom, with point-of-sale, inventory and CCTV systems moving to cloud-hosted platforms.
The Situation - Every store was connected by a single MPLS circuit terminating in a regional hub, from which all traffic - including the growing volume of SaaS and cloud traffic - was backhauled to a central internet breakout in India. Store bandwidth was fixed at 4 to 10 Mbps, upgrades took months, and a circuit fault meant a store trading offline on manual card terminals for an average of four hours. New store openings waited eight to twelve weeks for connectivity. Cloud migration of the POS platform was stalling because the WAN could not carry it.
The Challenge - The group needed more bandwidth, local internet breakout, and resilience at every store, at a lower cost than the MPLS estate, without a trading outage during migration and without building an in-house network operations function. The four countries presented very different last-mile realities: abundant fibre in Singapore and the UK, excellent metro fibre but variable suburban options in India and the UAE, and different rules on cross-border traffic and encryption. Payment card traffic had to remain PCI-DSS compliant, and CCTV retention meant a large, steady upstream flow that would swamp a poorly designed WAN.
What We Did - We designed a managed hybrid WAN. The distribution centres and head offices kept private connectivity - Ethernet private lines into Dollu's core in Mumbai, London and Singapore, plus dedicated internet access - with SD-WAN steering across both and private cloud on-ramps for the group's IaaS regions. Each store received two diverse internet circuits, fibre wherever available and business broadband otherwise, plus a 5G or 4G connection as a third path, with a Dollu-managed SD-WAN edge steering POS and voice over the best-performing path and breaking SaaS traffic out locally behind a centrally managed firewall policy. Payment traffic was segmented into its own VLAN and tunnel with restricted egress. Circuits were ordered and delivered country by country through Dollu's local carrier relationships, with a single project manager across all four markets. Migration ran in waves of ten to fifteen stores, each cut over out of trading hours with the MPLS circuit left live as a fallback for two weeks, and the group's own IT team was trained on the SD-WAN portal for day-to-day visibility while Dollu's NOC held operational responsibility.
The Results - All 120 stores and the five hub sites migrated in twenty-two weeks with no store trading day lost. Average store bandwidth rose from 6 Mbps to 150 Mbps. Unplanned per-store outage time fell from an average of 4.1 hours per month to 11 minutes, almost all of it single-path degradation invisible to store staff. Total WAN spend fell by roughly a third against the MPLS estate, including the managed service, and new-store connectivity lead time dropped from ten weeks to under two, since a store can now open on broadband and 5G while fibre is delivered. The POS cloud migration completed the following quarter, and the group has since added twelve new stores in two further countries on the same design.
“We expected the technology to be the hard part and it was not. The hard part was 120 buildings with different last-mile options in four regulatory environments, and having one team that could actually order, deliver and manage all of it was the reason it finished on schedule.”
