The Background

Reducing downtime with industry-leading SLAs

The Bland Group is a diverse family of individual companies, with a pioneering history of activities stretching back over 200 years. Giganet looks after various UK brands under the Bland Group including:

Hovertravel – the world’s only year-round scheduled hovercraft passenger service.
Skybreak – offers a range of services at the airport and beyond.
Griffon Hoverwork Ltd – is at the forefront of hovercraft development and has been involved in the manufacture and operation of hovercraft since they were first conceived, over 50 years ago.

The Bland Group already had Leased Lines installed, however they were receiving poor support from their previous supplier. As support was a hugely critical part of their business, Bland Group started to look elsewhere to reduce any unplanned downtime. Giganet’s 24×7 award-winning UK support with 6 hour guaranteed fix and 99.9% uptime SLA, made us the obvious choice for Bland Group. They are now on Giganet’s ELITE 100 Leased Line package, receiving ultrafast guaranteed download and upload speeds of 100Mb/s. As well as class-leading performance and support, they also have uncontended bandwidth and unlimited data transfers. Giganet’s ELITE Leased Line services are available across the UK.

Bland Group Solent Flyer
The Solution

Added security across the multiple brands

The Bland Group didn’t require a managed Wide Area Network (or MPLS) due to limited amounts of inter-site traffic between the respective brands, however Giganet identified that the various brands under the group could really benefit from the innovative Cisco Meraki MX range of security appliances. This gives them web dashboard managed platform for added security across the brands.

Different models of Meraki MX security appliance were recommended to fit the different requirements at each location. Bland’s central IT team can easily monitor and manage all Meraki appliances from a web dashboard view, with Giganet providing a managed support service to help with more complex requirements or covering the IT department for busier spells and holidays. The Cisco MX security appliances feature advanced IPS Intrusion Protection capabilities, along with Anti-Malware and Content Filtering to ensure that their network remains safe.

Bland Group
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