INDUSTRY WATCH
OUR GENERAL SECURITY POSTURE HAD TO CHANGE JUST AS THE WORLD CHANGES WITH NEW THREATS EVERY DAY .
Established in 1976 , Cross Hydraulics has grown to become one of Australia ’ s leading providers of imported hydraulic and electrical equipment to customers across the country . The family-owned firm employs more than 140 people and also manufactures a range of customized products to meet specific customer requirements .
Securing the distributed network
As the company has grown so requirement has also increased for a reliable IT infrastructure to support day-to-day operations . Initially provided as a centralized resource with the majority of their applications residing in the company ’ s Victoria headquarters , the company ’ s IT infrastructure has grown in size in recent years to cover offices across six sites in Australia and New Zealand .
While this topology had reflected past best IT practices , the advent of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS ) solutions , including the Microsoft Office 365 suite , has changed the way the company ’ s employees accessed their most critical applications .
Indeed , it was no longer necessary or efficient to use the previous centralized data center model . Forcing IT users to access the Internet through the Victoria head office had created a bottleneck affecting performance and also overworking the network .
While changing the network to a more distributed model was the solution , this also introduced a new challenge . The organization now needed to secure all its sites , as opposed to just their main data center , while maintaining secure intra-office connectivity and backup . came to security . Each office needed protection , and everything had to be managed as a cohesive whole . This coincided with the establishment of an office in New Zealand which also needed strengthened IT security infrastructure .
“ Our general security posture had to change just as the world changes with new threats every day ,” said Burrows . “ Moreover , the migration to Microsoft 365 required us to deploy Internet links to every site as opposed to a MPLS network back to a single firewall in the data center . This gave us efficiency for the workforce and the direct connection to our SaaS business tools . Each office needed protection as we broke away from the traditional data center server model and everything had to be managed by my managed service provider , GPK Group .”
Scaling up network with Barracuda
Barracuda has been leading the way for years with robust security solutions that are the perfect fit for Cross Hydraulics ’ requirements . Cross Hydraulics has been a user of Barracuda ’ s robust CloudGen Firewall models since 2018 .
Software-defined Wide Area Network ( SD-WAN ) technology , a key feature of Barracuda ’ s security solutions , provides the company with a flexible network design enabling direct access to the Internet through Barracuda ’ s firewalls , while at the same time offering dynamic and secure intra-office connectivity .
As Cross Hydraulics continues to flourish and grow , the firewalls are also sufficiently flexible to scale with the company ’ s changing requirements .
Cross Hydraulics IT Manager , Alex Burrows , said the larger network required a different approach when it
“ We now run a high-availability firewall configuration ,” said Burrows . “ This has been achieved by placing
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