Berg Propulsion case study

Background

Since 1929, Berg Propulsion has been building propellers. Superior craftsmanship, expert knowledge of materials and engineering are deeply rooted traditions carried on by generations of skilled employees.

Today, Berg Propulsion is one of the world's leading designers and producers of Controllable Pitch Propellers used for industrial and merchant shipping. Operating out of state-of-the-art production facilities in Sweden and Singapore, with sales and service offices located in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Istanbul, Dubai, Singapore, Bremen, San Sebastian, Rio de Janeiro, Busan and the Swedish west coast, the company has built over 6000 propellers to date. The company employs over 470 people globally.

Hydrodynamics is Berg Propulsion's key area of expertise, designing products that function reliably in tough marine environments at the highest performance level possible, with a minimum of down-time. Global Service & Support ensures that a highly skilled team of field service engineers is on permanent standby, while the ship is in dock or alongside it, anywhere in the world. The company's commitment to its customers is simply: "As our customer you can reach us anytime – anywhere."

The Challenge

Since the opening of its sales office in Latin America, the company's IT department never sleeps. IT support and services work 24/7 from Europe to Asia to the Americas, managing network infrastructure needs and ensuring seamless communications within the company as well as with customers wherever they may be in the world. "We cannot afford any downtime, not even a couple of hours for any maintenance shutdown," said Lucas Goh, Head of IT Operations for Asia.

The previous security systems were largely inadequate as the company grappled with a fast evolving security landscape and therefore having to constantly change security products in reaction to that. The frequency of downtime was very high and the administrators would need to restart the firewall frequently. For a company that services customers in different time zones across the world, this was a huge pain point.

"Communications is the core of our business. Network is the core of communications," said Lucas. "We had to carry out trials and usage tests with different vendors constantly. This called for repeated training and adjustments to the new solutions."

With the business expanding and a new production plant being set up in Singapore in 2007, Berg Propulsion needed a company-wide security solution that not only offered high performance but was easily scalable to keep pace with the company's growth. At the same time, it must be easy to manage and maintain as well as being resilient to the rapid and furious influx of security threats.

The WatchGuard® Solution

WatchGuard's network security appliances were first implemented in 2005. Using a combination of WatchGuard's 1250e, XTM 5 Series, and XTM 2 Series, Berg Propulsion realised they could do ‘much more with less'. The reasons for selecting WatchGuard were:

• Good price performance balance overall
• Easily scalable
• Ease of deployment made it easy to train new staff
• Reliability of systems and support services

WatchGuard's XTM family of network security appliances are performance-driven, providing blazing fast throughput and advanced networking features to handle high-volume traffic securely, all at an affordable price.

"The first thing that impressed me was its ease of use. It is all very logical," said Lucas. "The standard deployment interface made it almost a ‘plug and play'. In addition, the flexible management tools provide an intuitive centralized console, command line interface, and web UI to set policies and manage security wherever you are. It even comes with a quick start guide and, often that's all we needed to get it working," added Lucas.

Benefits

With a small team tasked to support the company's IT infrastructure worldwide, ease of deployment and seamless infrastructure management and communications across time zones contributed to a winning strategy for WatchGuard's solutions.

A reliable network providing seamless operations 24/7
"I can't remember the last time I had to call someone with a security problem," said Lucas. "With WatchGuard, we are always connected." WatchGuard's wide-ranging protection provides robust security including application-layer content inspection, keeping unwanted and dangerous threats away from the network. The IT team can now sleep easy without having to worry about the network connectivity round the clock.

High performance/efficiency without being complex
Each manager's desk at Berg Propulsion has an IP phone, a video phone and a PC, all connected via the IT network. For example, meetings between staff in all the global offices are part of day-to-day communications within the company. All employees work like one borderless office. The network is the core of Berg Propulsion's internal and external communications. Whilst all these are happening on the network, they are transparent to end users whom now do not need to worry about interruptions or disruptions in their normal operations.

Ease of deployment – Do more with less
WatchGuard's security solutions are so easy to deploy and present no legacy issues. Berg Propulsions is able to maintain the same number of IT infrastructure staff despite the company's growth, and perform even more security controls and management analytics in the process.

Scalability
WatchGuard's security solutions have demonstrated the ability to grow with Berg Propulsion. WatchGuard XTM solutions actually push beyond the UTM paradigm into what is called extensible threat management, offering features far beyond normal security functions, automating processes, and allowing future growth as security threats evolve.

WatchGuard also offers a unique model upgrade for those who grow even faster than expected. A simple license key allows you to increase performance and capacity quickly and inexpensively, without ripping and replacing hardware.

In conclusion, Berg Propulsion has experienced WatchGuard's unmatched performance and has very high confidence in its suite of enterprise security solutions. "Berg Propulsion believes in delivering high performance and reliability to our customers without complexity. WatchGuard has demonstrated that they do the same. With high scalability, unified threat management and one point of administration, this partnership is the best fit for us now and into the future," said Lucas.

For more information on WatchGuard's powerful network security solutions, visit www.watchguard.com.

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