Our client is an internationally operating machinery manufacturing company with 850 employees. Currently, their on-premises infrastructure is distributed across 13 locations worldwide. In the long term, the smaller sites are to be converted to cloud solutions. The objective is to find a solution that allows the entire infrastructure to be managed centrally from the main location. Networking the sites, especially in the areas of security and compliance, currently presents the greatest challenge.
“For instance, we have production sites in South America and planning offices in North America. Therefore, we need a system for comprehensive network transparency," says Tobias Paschek, project manager at comdivision. "This system should not only monitor the current network topology, which includes both the local network and MPLS lines, but also take future technologies into account.“
Paschek indicates that the client has ambitious plans: "We are currently planning with the client not only to switch from MPLS lines to an SD-WAN infrastructure," he says, "but we also want to fully migrate the smaller sites to the cloud. For the larger development sites, the client is relying on a multi-cloud strategy." This strategy involves using VMware Cloud on AWS on the respective continent and local VDI hosts with GPU support. All these instances are to be monitored and centrally controlled from Germany.
Some business areas outside of IT are currently undergoing changes, which is why the client needs a comprehensive overview of the network situation. To avoid failures during the relocation phase, application dependencies must be made transparent. "We want to get a picture of the dependencies between the applications, both for the current move and for future cloud migrations," explains the head of the network team.
"To ensure maximum flexibility with other industry-leading security providers without the cumbersome management of endpoint agents, etc., we suggested vRealize Network Insight," explains Tobias Paschek. This allowed the client not to commit to a single security solution since vRealize Network Insight operates independently of the provider.”
"The plan is to use VMware Cloud Foundation for the new multi-cloud infrastructure," says Paschek. "The client was very pleased that he can monitor the network security guidelines, which he developed together with the comdivision team, also in the new architecture."
