CASE STUDY
C
Counting the cost
As the third largest producer in the world of
non-woven materials, Danish manufacturer,
Fibertex, counts the cost when its factories
grind to a halt due to network connectivity
failure. After 15 minutes, it stops production.
The subsequent downtime costs around
100,000kr for every hour lost.
“Connectivity 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’t
work. This meant problems connecting
with our Danish HQ in Aalborg. We’ve 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,” said Thomas Martens, IT Team Lead
and Senior IT Administrator. “We work
with medical materials, so the quality and
safety of our products is critical. If you have
kids, it’s likely that you have used products
made by Fibertex at some point. This
means continuous, rigorous testing and
monitoring to ensure that they meet the
highest standards. Our customers expect
nothing less. We need to track everything
to maintain our stringent hygiene and
cleaning standards. We simply cannot afford
production downtime.” Investing in a software-defined future
The existing firewall solution also meant
that troubleshooting was difficult, meaning
that Martens and the team spent half a day,
every day on network maintenance. “Barracuda 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
“This couldn’t go on. We needed secure,
uninterrupted network connectivity at all
of our locations, more bandwidth and low
latency to keep everything running. Using
multiple ISP links, load balancing and
automatic fall back was also essential, so we
knew we were looking at implementing SD-
WAN,” said Martens.
Martens therefore turned to trusted IT
security partner, Ezenta, for advice and
Senior Network Specialist, Mikkel Planck,
suggested Barracuda’s offerings.
WE SIMPLY
CANNOT AFFORD
PRODUCTION
DOWNTIME.
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,”
said Martens.
Reaping the rewards
“We’ve installed Barracuda’s firewall
solution at 14 of our 22 locations so far in
Japan, America, Malaysia, Brazil and across
Europe. Thanks to the proof of concept trial,
deployment has been seamless. Setting up
a new location takes just minutes; we can do
this at the flick of a switch. The configuration
stays the same, we just set up a new
box without any downtime or migration
problems. It’s really easy to replace a unit
and we can just choose the line with the
lowest latency if we need to change lines for
one of our sites.”
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