Proten owns and operates 36 broiler chicken farms across Australia, representing approximately 17% of our annual broiler chicken production.
All of these farms need to communicate securely with the Head Office in order to provide operational information and ensure all business data is backed up. This was achieved with a secure VPN solution.
In early 2020, Proten called on it’s long-time IT support partner Greenlight ITC to investigate issues with the speed of access from many of the remote farm sites. An internal audit showed that day-to-day operations over the secure VPN could take significant time to complete, resulting in inefficient and dissatisfied farm staff.
An investigation showed that the higher latency satellite NBN connections were introducing a delay in VPN negotiation, causing the user to notice significant delays in opening and saving files. Due to the latency being a result of the satellite technology in use, there was no way to directly resolve the issue under the current design.
“Proten wishes to thank Joel, Sorwar and all the other techs who assisted in their Sharepoint change – It was extremely smooth and well planned with zero issues (other than staff impatience as they waited their turn.) It was a great Greenlight experience..”
Greenlight recognized that the resolution to this issue would need to come from changing the approach to the problem. The issue needed to be addressed without affecting the security of the business data.
Greenlight recommended Microsoft SharePoint with the aim to shift the impact of the higher latency connection. Previously, when opening a file or saving it, the action was taking place directly over the high latency internet connection, resulting in high load times. SharePoint allowed the Farm’s relevant data to be synchronised to the computer on-site, meaning opening and saving times were not impacted by internet speed. Instead, after the file was saved, the synchronisation of the file occurred in the background causing no impact to the user’s efficiency.
By switching to SharePoint, Proten remote users have experienced a night-and-day change in their experience working with shared files. They can also benefit from collaboration features working with Microsoft Office documents simultaneously. Best of all, there was no added recurring cost to implement this solution as Proten was already eligible for SharePoint and already had a complete backup solution in place to cover the change.
