Vinarchy (formerly Accolade Wines)

The problem

Accolade Wines is one of Australia's largest wine companies, headquartered in Reynella, South Australia, with operations spanning Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. The company's heritage dates to 1836, and its scale means that the reliability of core business systems is critical — not just locally, but globally.

Accolade had migrated core business workloads to cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud, while also retaining systems with local AS400 hosting providers. To connect their production environments to these cloud platforms, the company was relying on IPsec point-to-point VPN tunnels running over the public internet. The problem was that internet-based VPNs are inherently unpredictable: outages were irregular but recurring, latency varied without warning, and throughput could not be guaranteed. For a business of Accolade's scale, where an inability to reach cloud-hosted ERP and operational systems would immediately affect staff productivity and business processes across multiple countries, this was an unacceptable risk.

Accolade needed a solution that would give them the consistency and performance guarantees that internet VPNs fundamentally cannot provide — private, dedicated connectivity to their cloud platforms backed by carrier-grade SLAs, with redundancy built in from the ground up.

What we did

Caznet engineered a redundant fibre connectivity solution with geographically diverse paths terminating at separate Caznet data centres. This physical diversity provides the foundation for true redundancy — a failure at one site does not affect the other, and traffic can fail over automatically without manual intervention.

From these data centres, Caznet provisioned Megaport Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs) to AWS Direct Connect in Sydney and Oracle FastConnect in London. These are private, dedicated carrier connections — not tunnels over the internet — providing consistent latency, guaranteed throughput and SLA-backed uptime between Accolade's production environments and their cloud platforms. The IPsec VPN tunnels were decommissioned entirely for cloud access.

A Managed MPLS IP VPN WAN was deployed from the Caznet data centres to Accolade's production locations, creating a private backbone between sites. Cross-connects at the data centre level allowed Accolade's AS400 hosting providers to connect directly into the Caznet network, eliminating another layer of internet dependency. Enterprise Internet services were also provided via Caznet's data centre infrastructure. Accolade is also investigating SD-WAN and Megaport Cloud Router to further reduce on-premises infrastructure requirements in the future.

The result

The elimination of internet-based VPNs for cloud access transformed the consistency of Accolade's network experience. The latency fluctuations and unpredictable outages that had characterised the VPN environment were replaced by a stable, predictable connection backed by Megaport's carrier-grade SLA. Staff accessing AWS-hosted and Oracle-hosted systems can rely on the connection performing consistently throughout the working day, regardless of what is happening on the public internet.

The geographically redundant fibre design means there is no single point of failure in the physical layer. The AS400 hosting providers, previously connected via the public internet, are now directly on the Caznet network — closer to the cloud platforms and without the variability of a public transit path. The overall architecture is simpler to operate, better performing and more resilient than the multi-provider VPN environment it replaced.

The solution was delivered on time and to specification, with Caznet's engineering team managing the complexity of coordinating Megaport provisioning, physical fibre delivery and MPLS configuration in parallel. The relationship continues as Accolade's connectivity requirements evolve.