Our customer is an international mechanical engineering company with 850 employees. They have currently distributed the on-premises infrastructure to 13 locations worldwide. The smaller locations are to be converted to cloud solutions in the long term. They are looking for a solution with which they can manage the entire infrastructure centrally from the main location. The greatest challenge is currently the networking of the locations, especially security and compliance.
“With production locations in South America, for example, and planningoffices in North America, for example, we needed a holistic system of network transparency,” reports Tobias Paschek, comdivision's project manager, “in particular, this system should not only monitor the current network topology, which local network and MLPS Includes cables, but also take future technologies into account."
Paschek says that the customer has bigger plans: “we are currently notonly planning the move away from MLPS lines to an SD-WAN infrastructure with the customer,” says Paschek, “but we want to move the smaller locations completely into the cloud. For the larger development locations, the customer relies on a multi-strategy”. This multi-cloud strategy includes the use of VMware Cloud on AWS instances on the respective continent and local VDI hosts with GPU support. All these instances are to be integrated into the monitoring and managed centrally from Germany.
However, since some areas outside of IT were currently in a state of upheaval - e.g. entire locations were to be relocated - the customer needed an up-to-date overview of the current situation in the network as quickly as possible, ecause application dependencies had to be made transparent in order to prevent failures during the relocation phase. “We wanted to get an idea of the dependencies between the individual applications with regard to the future cloud migration. On the one hand, so that nothing is forgotten when moving and we will also have a precise overview in the future – also with regard to error detection across cloud boundaries! ” explains the network manager.
“To ensure the greatest possible flexibility with other industry-leading security providers, without the cumbersome management of endpoint agents, etc.,we proposed vRealize Network Insight," says Tobias Paschek. As a result, our customer did not necessarily have to commit to just one security solution, as vRealize Network Insight is vendor-independent.
The plan is to use VMware Cloud Foundation for the new multi-cloud infrastructure,”explains Paschek. “So the customer was very pleased that he was able to enforce and monitor his network security guidelines, which he developed together with the comdivision team, in the new architecture. "
