Being a major Caterpillar dealer in the Southeast, this company provides new, used, and rental equipment as well as services for industries around the world in agriculture, construction, forestry, mining, government, and industrial work.

Technology Challenges a Plenty

Priding themselves on delivering the most complete innovative equipment and customer support in the industry, this organization needs to ensure maximum up time as peak efficiency is critical. This needs to be done across their entire organization from machinery, to front office, sales, and support.

One of the most crucial elements to making sure these departments are operating in sync is the network running behind the scenes. The network needs to be secure, resilient and have the ability to scale.

For this industrial services company, the network needed attention and it had to be addressed quickly as their security infrastructure was approaching end of life.

Having technology installed from a few different manufacturers, including CloudGenix/Palo Alto Networks, and Cisco ASAs, there was a need for a secure firewall along with a host of other technology challenges.

The clock was ticking on the viability and manageability of their network, so the company took action.

Having worked with this company in the past, Mainline Information Systems, a technology solutions provider with more than 30 years of industry experience, had a good understanding of their network.

As their firewalls were approaching end of life, they realized software updates were no longer able to remediate the situation and a firewall upgrade was necessary. As security issues started creeping in, this organization leaned on Mainline to provide more optimal solutions that would fit their needs.

Mainline brought three manufacturers to the table for consideration: Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks. After a deep dive into each solution and some independent research by the company’s executives with Gartner, Fortinet and its Security Fabric was selected. One of the key factors in their decision was the integration between the Fortigate Firewall and Fortinet’s Endpoint solution, FortiEDR. The company also saw the advantages of Fortinet’s platform approach to help with future initiatives and maintain a consistent and central enforcement of policy management.

One Vendor, Multiple Wins

Today, it’s all systems go.

Mainline has implemented a wide variety of solutions for this organization from the Fortinet Security Fabric, including FortiGates with SD WAN, FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, and FortiMDR/EDR.

The resultant business benefits of these solutions have been highly impactful.

They include:

• Improved and easier problem determination.
• Single vendor, not multiple, for seamless operations, improved manageability, and increased network visibility from one management console.
• Overall security is dramatically improved.

With the success of the security project, this organization will be implementing new Fortinet switches for their core network. Moving ahead, they are also considering additional Fortinet solutions that will easily scale as their business continues to grow.

Now, the days of a problematic, disjointed, and end-of-life network are nothing more than a distant memory, and this company can focus on what they do best: Serve their customers with that innovative spirit that has been their calling card since day one.