Pacific National adopts Fortinet solutions

Australia’s top private rail freight operator Pacific National has deployed Fortinet SD-Branch and Secure SD-WAN networking solutions to help safeguard its critical infrastructure against cyberthreats.

Working with network and security services partner Ip.Glass, Pacific National has deployed the Fortinet solutions across its network, which consists of more than 86 sites and over 5000 LAN endpoints.

The solution replaces Pacific National’s traditional hub-and-spoke private MPLS network, which was expensive to manage, offered limited bandwidth and redundancy, and was not responsive enough to support Pacific National’s mission-critical applications.

The replacement solution includes a FortiGate next-generation firewall, FortiSwitch switch and FortiAP wireless access points for all 86 sites. Pacific National IT Infrastructure Manager Steve Carroll said the project also included upgrades to several firewalls, proxies and routers in the company’s data centre.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

Pacific National CIO Paul Williams said the deployment has achieved a 50% reduction in annual networking costs while improving the company’s security posture with granular security controls.

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