Client background

Client: A global material solutions company

Industry: Materials

Area of operations: APAC, Europe, Middle East, Africa and America

Products: An extensive portfolio of specialty industrial minerals

Number of employees: Over 10,000

Challenges

The client had a disparate setup, which included multiple technologies, processes and vendors across geographies. The resultant challenges included lack of comprehensive security solution, heterogeneous LAN switching environment and decentralized vendor management, which led to operational issues. The network architecture was prone to production outage due to lack of redundancy in LAN design in critical remote sites. The client was experiencing performance issues in accessing public clouds (Azure and SAP).

In addition, end of support devices for network in remote sites needed proper inventory, manufacturer support services and a common monitoring and management platform.

Solution

Wipro built a state-of-the-art data center leveraging Cisco Nexus 9000 switches with spine and leaf architecture. Wipro’s team of experts extended the network to Azure and SAP Cloud by leveraging express route to access resources in the cloud.

• Enabled VXLAN in data center to resolve looping and scalability issues and provided the client the option of using multi-tenancy in the DC environment as required
• Standardized architecture across various site categories using Cisco devices
• Upgraded the infrastructure in remote sites in order to achieve standardized and predictable SLAs
• Enabled homogeneous LAN switching and proper wireless solution by standardizing sites with Cisco equipment and  controlling wireless access points using region-specific controllers
• Reduced LAN switch infrastructure through better wireless coverage
• Deployed HP NMI monitoring tool for proactive monitoring
• Designed LAN redundancy for data centers and critical sites
• Contextualized security intelligence to improve security posture by using multi-level traffic filtering and SIEM tool as security integration layer
• Created a centralized service desk in different regions for round- the- clock support
• Deployed a CMDB tool for central inventory and asset management

Business impact

The new architecture helped the client achieve complete LAN resiliency and aggregation links, and enabled multi-tenancy capability. It helped protect the client from external threats as it could easily integrate with multiple security solutions. The architecture design helped the client achieve better application performance and network reliability.

Highlights:

• Enhanced LAN rationalization and Wi-Fi first adoption
• Seamless connectivity for users due to the state-of-the-art data center
• Better LAN redundancy and manageability due to transformation of remote sites using Cisco devices
• Reduction in complexity of infra estate through consolidation of technology platform
• Agile and scalable model environment with catalogue based pricing
• End-to-end service management through centralized service desk
  
• Unified management and single pane of reporting for the entire estate
  
• Better inventory and asset management for effective operations
  

The client was running a disparate setup with multiple technologies, multiple processes and a multi-vendor set up across geos. Through Wipro’s solution, the client now has a seamless single operating model across 34 countries, a modern datacenter that is hybrid cloud-ready and remote sites that are standardized on the Wipro-Cisco Office-in-a-Box solution. 

Anand Jayaraman, General Manager, Continental Europe, Wipro