How a 200-Seat Recruitment Firm Eliminated 3 Hours of Daily Downtime with Smartflo SD-WAN

The Challenge

Unreliable MPLS links across 4 branches. The firm operated from Ahmedabad (HQ, 120 seats), Surat (40 seats), Vadodara (25 seats), and Rajkot (15 seats). Each branch had a single MPLS link from a regional ISP, with no failover. When the link went down — which happened 2-3 times per week at the smaller branches — the entire office went offline.

VoIP call drops during candidate interviews. The recruitment team conducted 80-100 voice and video calls daily across branches. On the MPLS links, jitter regularly exceeded 40ms, causing voice quality degradation and dropped calls mid-interview. Recruiters resorted to using personal mobile phones, losing call recordings and CRM integration.

Cloud application performance. The firm had migrated to cloud-based CRM (Zoho Recruit) and HR tools, but the MPLS architecture backhauled all internet traffic through the Ahmedabad HQ. Surat and Vadodara staff experienced 3-5 second load times on every CRM page — a recruiter processing 40 candidate records per hour loses 2-3 minutes per hour just waiting for pages to load.

No visibility into network health. The firm had no monitoring. Outages were discovered when staff complained. The IT team (two people for 200 seats) spent most of their time on reactive troubleshooting.

The Solution

Smartflo SD-WAN Deployment

We deployed Tata Smartflo SD-WAN appliances at all 4 branches, each with dual WAN uplinks (primary broadband + LTE failover). The deployment took 11 working days from site survey to go-live.

Architecture:

• Ahmedabad HQ: Smartflo edge appliance, 100 Mbps fibre primary + 50 Mbps broadband secondary
• Surat: Smartflo edge, 50 Mbps broadband primary + 4G LTE failover
• Vadodara: Smartflo edge, 50 Mbps broadband primary + 4G LTE failover
• Rajkot: Smartflo edge, 30 Mbps broadband primary + 4G LTE failover

Key configuration decisions:

• Application-aware routing: VoIP and video traffic routed over the lowest-latency link with automatic failover in under 300ms — fast enough that a voice call does not drop during switchover.
• Direct internet breakout: Cloud applications (Zoho, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) break out directly at each branch instead of backhauling through HQ. CRM page loads dropped from 3-5 seconds to under 1 second.
• QoS policies: VoIP prioritised over bulk data. Even during a large file upload, voice quality remains consistent.
• Centralised management: All 4 branches managed from a single Smartflo dashboard with real-time link health, application performance, and alerting.

VEMIO Monitoring Overlay

We layered VEMIO monitoring on top of the Smartflo deployment — tracking not just the WAN links but the LAN switches, access points, and UPS units at each branch. This gave the IT team a single pane of glass for the entire network, with tiered alerting so they only get called for issues that need their attention.

The Implementation

The MPLS circuits were retained for 30 days as fallback, then decommissioned. Monthly connectivity cost dropped from ₹1.8L to ₹1.3L — a 28% reduction — while delivering higher bandwidth and redundancy at every branch.

What the Client Said

"Our recruiters were using personal phones for candidate calls because the office lines kept dropping. Within a week of the Smartflo deployment, every call was going through the office system again — recorded, logged, and integrated with our CRM. That alone justified the project."

— Director of Operations

Key Takeaways

SD-WAN is not a bandwidth upgrade — it is an architecture change. The firm's problem was not insufficient bandwidth. It was single points of failure, no application awareness, and backhauled traffic patterns that punished branch users. SD-WAN solved all three.

Dual-WAN with LTE failover is the minimum for any branch. The cost of a 4G SIM as a failover link is negligible compared to even one hour of branch downtime. Every branch should have it.

Monitoring is not optional. Without VEMIO, the IT team would still be discovering outages from user complaints — even with the more reliable SD-WAN links. The monitoring layer is what converted reactive IT to proactive IT.

Vinay Enterprises is a Tata Smartflo channel partner. We design, deploy, and manage SD-WAN networks for multi-site enterprises across India. Contact us for a site survey.