{"id":37105,"date":"2020-01-30T11:38:21","date_gmt":"2020-01-30T11:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/2020\/01\/30\/global-textiles-producer-prevents-costly-downtime-with-sd-wan-solution\/"},"modified":"2020-02-05T19:43:37","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T19:43:37","slug":"global-textiles-producer-prevents-costly-downtime-with-sd-wan-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/2020\/01\/30\/global-textiles-producer-prevents-costly-downtime-with-sd-wan-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Global textiles producer prevents costly downtime with SD-WAN solution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As a large enterprise, it is imperative to operate with secure, uninterrupted network connectivity to avoid costly downtime and lack of productivity. For Fibertex, this was top priority and ultimately meant continuous, rigorous testing and monitoring to ensure it achieved overall success. Thomas Martens, IT Team Lead and Senior IT Administrator, tells us why the company chose a Barracuda solution to improve performance. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Counting the cost <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the third largest producer in the world of non-woven\nmaterials, Danish manufacturer, Fibertex, counts the cost when its factories\ngrind to a halt due to network connectivity failure. After 15 minutes, it stops\nproduction. The subsequent downtime costs around 100,000kr for every hour lost.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cConnectivity at two of our largest production sites in Malaysia was a major problem for us. We were reliant on two very expensive MPLS lines and when one went down, the other line typically didn\u2019t work. This meant problems connecting with our Danish HQ in Aalborg. We\u2019ve got 14 factories in total with multiple lines on every site. But with the ERP system running from Denmark, everything at our remote locations ran really slowly, which was very frustrating and network latency was really high,\u201d said Thomas Martens, IT Team Lead and Senior IT Administrator. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe work with medical materials, so\nthe quality and safety of our products is critical. If you have kids,\nit\u2019s likely that you have used products made by Fibertex at some point. This\nmeans continuous, rigorous testing and monitoring to ensure that they meet the\nhighest standards. Our customers expect nothing less. We need to track\neverything to maintain our stringent hygiene and cleaning standards. We simply cannot afford production downtime.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nexisting firewall solution also meant that troubleshooting was difficult,\nmeaning that Martens and the team spent half a day, every day on network\nmaintenance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Investing in a software-defined future <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis couldn\u2019t go on. We needed\nsecure, uninterrupted network connectivity at all of our locations, more\nbandwidth and low latency to keep everything running. Using multiple ISP\nlinks, load balancing and automatic fall back was also essential, so we knew we\nwere looking at implementing SD-WAN,\u201d said Martens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martens therefore turned to trusted IT security partner,\nEzenta, for advice and Senior Network Specialist, Mikkel Planck, suggested\nBarracuda\u2019s offerings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBarracuda quickly set up a proof of concept trial for its CloudGen Firewall. I was really impressed with what I saw. The set up only took two days. Barracuda installed three boxes directly on our sites in Denmark and Malaysia, in addition to a virtual firewall. We let the trial run and one week in, there was a major line drop during testing. We were braced for the usual disruption but everything continued to work without interruption. We tested other vendors at the time but nothing came close to Barracuda,\u201d said Martens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reaping the rewards <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve installed Barracuda\u2019s firewall solution at 14 of our\n22 locations so far in Japan, America, Malaysia, Brazil and across Europe.\nThanks to the proof of concept trial, deployment has been seamless. Setting up a new\nlocation takes just minutes, we can do this at the flick of a switch. The\nconfiguration stays the same, we just set up a new box without any downtime or\nmigration problems. It\u2019s really easy to replace a unit\nand we can just choose the line with the lowest latency if we need to change\nlines for one of our sites.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A single management interface means the team can easily\nvisualise and monitor network performance and they now only spend a few hours\neach week on any maintenance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t even have to look every day. The old firewall\nmeant we spent hours each day troubleshooting but now\nwe have the time to spend on new projects like upgrading our infrastructure and\ncarrying out a new SharePoint installation.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were also highly impressed with the level of support\nfrom Alex and the Barracuda team. We felt like we were on our own before\nwithout much support from our previous vendor. We are now part of a really\ngreat partnership with Barracuda and Ezenta.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking ahead <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data analytics is on the roadmap and Martens is looking at\nhow Barracuda Firewall Insights can help the team better manage the network and\nSD-WAN connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Martens explains in more detail why the Barracuda solution was a great fit for Fibertex<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can\nyou provide an overview of Fibertex\u2019s core business objectives?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our primary business objective is to stand out and be the best among our competitors when it comes to quality. Accordingly, we strive to provide a dependable and reliable offering, so people feel safe using our product when it comes to providing for their customers. We know that we are not the cheapest out there, but our quality is second to none and that makes it worth the price tag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What were some of the unique cyberthreats you experienced when operating with the previous solution? Have these now been resolved with Barracuda?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our main priority was that we required the functionality of the SD-WAN. We had a few issues with ransomware prior to utilising the Barracuda software and since employing the new solution we haven\u2019t had any ransomware trouble at all. Since moving to Barracuda, we directly benefit from the practicality of SD-WAN as well as enjoying the peace of mind that comes from knowing our security is taken care of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nkinds of efficiencies has the seamless solution enabled?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We benefit from much more stable production now and don\u2019t suffer from network connectivity failures as we did before. Thanks to SD-WAN, if one Internet connection breaks down, the other line takes over. As a result, we are preventing expensive product downtime and saving a lot of time elsewhere too, in both maintaining the solution and in closing down the lines if we lost connectivity and restarting them again when we regained connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nsecurity benefits does visualising and monitoring network performance offer?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By visualising and monitoring network performance we are able to get a clearer overview of our network infrastructure in operation across the world. Alongside this, since employing Barracuda\u2019s solutions, we are able to figure out performance issues regarding network and latency with ease in order to quickly resolve them, which was a big problem with our old vendor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nsort of long-term benefits has the solution provided?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s definitely saved costs. We no longer have to pay for expensive MPLS lines and with our old solution we had to spend a lot of money on consultants – this is no longer an issue for us. Deploying Barracuda CloudGen Firewall has saved the business 400,000kr so far. Furthermore, a considerable amount of our own time was also spent trying to maintain the previous solution. With Barracuda, everything is stable and runs smoothly, freeing up our time to focus on the projects that really matter to our business. This allows us to competitively differentiate from our competitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\ndoes the future security roadmap look like for Fibertex?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

First on the to-do list, we still need to replace a few of our old firewalls with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. When that’s complete, we will start to look into optimising our set up further. Additionally, we are looking into ensuring our setup is more secure, by both improving user awareness and employee training, and by implementing a more holistic security setup with Barracuda Next-Generation anti-virus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a large enterprise, it is imperative to operate with secure, uninterrupted network connectivity to avoid costly downtime and lack of productivity. For Fibertex, this was top priority and ultimately meant continuous, rigorous testing and monitoring to ensure it achieved overall success. Thomas Martens, IT Team Lead and Senior IT Administrator, tells us why the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":37113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[205,51,57,29,93,24],"tags":[14310,14311,14312,14313,14314,14315,254,6178],"class_list":["post-37105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-case-studies","category-case-study-newsletter","category-enterprise-security","category-software","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-aalborg","tag-barracuda","tag-barracuda-firewall-insights","tag-cloudgen-firewall","tag-ezenta","tag-fibertex","tag-network-performance","tag-sd-wan"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37105"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37122,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37105\/revisions\/37122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}