“Each site has its task; For example, a site is a bakery that will produce fresh sliced bread every day. Another is purely for dispatch; another only has raw materials. These sites run 24/7 along with our automated collection system that needs to be constantly connected to SAP, so we can’t afford to have an outage.”

Without an additional layer of connectivity to support their journey to and from the data center, the team was concerned about a lack of network redundancy and resiliency.

“Before MVE, the data center was a huge single point of failure. If a data center goes down, even for just an hour, the consequences could be disastrous; we couldn’t even access the core of our network,” Paleothodoros said.

In manufacturing, time is of the essence.

“For a lot of our big customers, you have to book a delivery time, and if you miss it, you’ll be lucky to get another one that same day. So everything must work on time,” Paleothodoros said.

Goodman Fielder has already used MCR for multi-cloud and cloud-to-cloud connectivity, connecting its AWS and Azure workloads. And while MCR provides the speed, security, and reliability of their data while in the cloud, they still had challenges connecting their 70+ on-premises sites reliably.

“With so many sites, we were having trouble with routing [from the branch to the cloud] for the setup we needed,” Paleothodoros said.

“There was a lot of routing, a lot of subnets, and a limitation with full routing. Managing our connectivity from the site was complicated and inefficient.” it is not future-proofed, it is not profitable and it is increasingly difficult to manage.