Elly Yates-Roberts |
Founded in 1997 and based in Gütersloh, Germany, the Hagedorn Group provides services including demolition, remediation of contaminated sites, disposal, and material flow management as well as civil engineering and the creation of industrial outdoor installations, revitalisation, and the development of new utilisation concepts. Heavy-load logistics and crane services complete the group’s extensive portfolio.
In recent years, Hagedorn has been acquiring new businesses at a rapid speed. To accommodate that expansion, Hagedorn decided to centralise all its services and use Microsoft Azure as the central cloud infrastructure provider. This would allow Hagedorn to establish a consistent infrastructure concept, making it quick and efficient to integrate newly acquired subsidiaries.
When looking for security and connectivity, Hagedorn was looking for an enterprise-grade, cloud-native firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution that was easy-to-use but flexible enough to react to and accommodate the rapidly changing requirements of high-growth companies.
The solution that Hagedorn chose to fill this need was Barracuda CloudGen WAN. Built on the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, the solution combines the benefits of next-generation firewalls, secure SD-WAN, native Azure integration, and intelligent automation to deliver a practical secure access service edge solution.
CloudGen WAN can be deployed directly from Azure Marketplace for as many regions as needed and administered centrally in the CloudGen WAN management portal, providing connectivity for both office locations and remote endpoints. CloudGen WAN onsite devices measure the available bandwidths and quality of all internet uplinks and between VPN endpoints, which are then available to the security and SD-WAN policy engine to select the best suitable uplink for an application. The solution can therefore provide companies of any size with the capability to move network infrastructure, routing, security, and remote access into the public cloud of their choice.
Running as a native service in Azure with onsite devices providing all security and SD-WAN functions to the public cloud, the solution was able to match the dynamic requirements created by the growth that Hagedorn was pursuing. CloudGen WAN allowed Hagedorn to meet its complex requirements for security and SD-WAN at every location within its growing group of companies.
“Barracuda CloudGen WAN was the only cloud-native FWaaS that provided all the enterprise security levels we needed, as well as including SD-WAN services for uninterrupted connectivity and reliable application access to Azure,” says Hans Redlich, IT lead for Hagedorn Group.
Whenever a new subsidiary needs to be integrated, a CloudGen WAN site device can be quickly deployed. Via the cloud portal, zero-touch deployment pushes all settings to the appliances, allowing the site to get up and running without the need for on-site IT personnel to configure the device and making roll-out of the service faster and less expensive for widely distributed organisations. On top of this, remote users can access company resources securely using the Personal Access with CloudGen WAN service, which provides an encrypted VPN tunnel directly from work-at-home environments or while travelling.
With CloudGen WAN site devices deployed at every location, full next-generation firewall security and immediate availability of all cloud-hosted applications at high performance levels is now guaranteed for Hagedorn Group. The included SD-WAN functions define a new standard for supporting future business growth. Uninterrupted connectivity to Microsoft Azure allows all devices to send their logs in real time to Azure Log Analytics and Microsoft Sentinel as the central security information and event management system for an additional level of visibility and proactive security across the whole network.
“Barracuda CloudGen WAN enabled us to implement a central IT management system to integrate newly acquired subsidiaries quickly and efficiently with zero-touch deployment of CloudGen WAN site devices,” says Redlich.
This article was originally published in the Spring 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.