Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 26 | Page 59

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.” www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 59