Pacific National is taking a stand against potential data leak threats, installing new software to bolster its infrastructure protection
Cybersecurity company Fortinet has announced that Pacific National, the largest private rail freight operator in Australia, with partner, Ip.Glass, has deployed Fortinet Secure SD-Branch and Secure SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) to safeguard its critical infrastructure against cyber threats while boosting secure network access for reliable operations, halving its annual networking costs.
With more than 86 sites and 5,000 endpoints on the local area network (LAN), Pacific National was facing network challenges that hindered its ability to modernise its transportation management system (TMS) with best-of-breed components.
The company’s traditional hub-and-spoke private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network was expensive to manage, offered limited bandwidth and redundancy, and was not responsive enough to support Pacific National’s mission-critical applications.
To address its network challenges, Pacific National worked with Fortinet’s trusted partner and network and security services provider, Ip.Glass, to deploy a comprehensive Fortinet Secure SD-Branch and Secure SD-WAN solution.
The solution included a FortiGate next-generation firewall (NGFW), FortiSwitch switch, and FortiAP wireless access points at all 86 sites along with FortiExtender cellular gateways at sites with 4G and 5G access. In addition, several firewalls, proxies, and routers in the data centre were upgraded to Fortinet solutions.
“The SD-WAN project was an absolute joy, working with Ip.Glass and Fortinet, giving our engineers new technology to play with, and being able to modernise the technology across our whole network landscape from a data centre and site perspective,” PacNat information technology infrastructure manager Steve Carroll says.
“We see Ip.Glass as an extension of our IT team; their engineers really understand our business and our network, they came to every site with us and they’ve shown a passion for it.”
With the Fortinet Secure SD-Branch solution, Pacific National has achieved impressive results, including a 50 per cent reduction in annual networking costs, improved security posture with granular security controls, and better visibility of network traffic.
Paul Williams, CIO of Pacific National, says: “By deploying Fortinet, we’re cutting our entire network costs in half.”
The solution has also led to an enhanced user experience and better employee health and well-being at remote sites, improved network performance, redundancy, and resilience, and the ability to provision connectivity to new sites in a matter of days, rather than months.
As a result of the project, Pacific National has had a major reduction in network outages due to deploying a highly redundant solution including multiple active-active internet links to each site.
The combination of links has been designed to provide both carrier-level redundancy and a mix of wired and wireless internet links. Remote locations, such as Cook in South Australia and other sites, also significantly benefit from the Starlink satellite connection providing low latency high-speed connection in the areas not serviceable by NBN, fibre and 4G technologies.