Business Challenges

As Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing continue to advance rapidly, Chinese smart manufacturing companies face challenges related to the high cost of dedicated internet, long deployment time, and unstable cross-border connectivity in their efforts to globalize. These companies often have operations in different regions, with dispersed production facilities, globally growing supply chains, and the need for real-time data transmission.

Overseas branches have higher requirements for reliable, cost-effective network services and network quality, especially network stability, which is crucial for smooth production processes and business continuity.

CypressTel provides comprehensive solutions tailored to the needs of a multinational smart manufacturing company. The company is headquartered in Shenzhen, with subsidiaries in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as multiple overseas branches and factories in the US, Belgium, Kenya, Nigeria, and India. However, the overseas factories have been experiencing stability issues with traditional networks, leading to network failures and interruptions in industrial data transmission, which have caused widespread business disruptions.

Solution Deployment

To address this, the company needed to optimize its existing network to improve availability and business continuity for the high-performance transmission of critical data while ensuring that normal internet traffic is accessed through the local internet.

After engaging with CypressTel, the company received specialized services and support. Through extensive communication, demand analysis, and technical diagnosis, it was discovered that the company's headquarters and various branches used a Hub-Spoke architecture connected via IPSec, with the group's ERP system deployed on the AWS public cloud.

The networking requirements for this multinational smart manufacturing company included:

1. Connecting the group's headquarters, multiple branch offices, and factories in a cross-border network to build an internal corporate network for centralized management.

2. Providing the headquarters with real-time production status updates from each branch and factory through the network, reducing overall network operation pressure.

3. Exchanging data and collaborating with global distributors, suppliers, and partners, requiring data encryption and access control to ensure data transmission security.

4. Ensuring stable, efficient, and prompt large-scale production, business, and related data transmission to the headquarters or the cloud.

The company aimed to achieve real-time data transmission between its headquarters, branches, factories, and global distributors with a centrally managed and intelligently interconnected network. This would solve issues such as slow cross-border network access, network disruptions, difficult partner access, and high operating costs, ensuring smooth production and operations.

In response to these requirements, CypressTel provided a flexible and easy-to-manage enterprise networking solution for the company using industry-leading SD-WAN networking, and the results after deployment were significant.

CypressTel assisted the company in constructing a new network architecture that allowed for flexible networking, zero-touch startup, and rapid network access. This architecture facilitated efficient interconnection between the cloud, data centers, and factories. The headquarters implemented dual dedicated network access to the local backbone network nodes, while other branches were upgraded to "dedicated line + internet," significantly enhancing the network's high availability and continuity.

Implementing intelligent load balancing and efficient transmission enabled the acceleration of SaaS applications and improved the transmission of critical applications, significantly improving bandwidth utilization. This was achieved by integrating existing underlying resources and implementing local internet egress for internet access traffic.

To facilitate centralized management and global monitoring, we provided the company with a unified management platform for network configuration, centralized management of global factories' networks, and an intelligent visualization management platform. This made monitoring and maintaining the network easier, achieving global monitoring and configuration management.

Network security is a top priority for the smart manufacturing industry, and SD-WAN plays a crucial role in this aspect. Due to the complex geographic locations of the headquarters and various branches / factories, network attacks have been on the rise. Strengthening network security is a key goal of the company's digital transformation. SD-WAN facilitates intelligent control and optimization of wide-area network traffic and also provides unified security policies and monitoring mechanisms, including encryption technologies, virtual private networks, and firewalls, to manage malicious activities and policy violations within the network. This ensures the secure transmission of sensitive data and provides a highly reliable, stable, and secure network connectivity solution for the manufacturing industry.

Furthermore, SD-WAN supports enterprises in building a powerful Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture, which integrates security and network functions into a single cloud-delivered service. This helps protect network data access and improve network efficiency and performance.

• Provides an integrated network service to improve network connection quality.

• Zero-touch deployment enables global dealers and branches to access the network quickly.

• Realizes cloud-edge-end integration to ensure data transmission security.

• Visualized management of all network devices to simplify operations and maintenance.

• Reduces IT O&M labor costs.

OneWAN (SD-WAN) is a logical network created by CypressTel using overlay technology based on its global SD-WAN backbone network architecture. It virtualizes branch offices through a powerful self-developed SDN central management platform. It simplifies the service management and deployment of the wide-area network between branch offices, data centers, and the cloud and provides enterprises with a cloud-management-terminal integrated service.

In addition to the self-developed SD-WAN platform, OneWAN (SD-WAN) supports multiple leading international SD-WAN device suppliers, such as VMware, HPE Aruba Networking, Huawei, Sangfor, and Fortinet, providing targeted SD-WAN global networking services for different customer needs.

Advantages of CypressTel SD-WAN networking:

1. Rapid deployment: Provides a one-stop solution, supports cloud and on-premises deployment, simplifies network management, and improves business efficiency.

2. Flexible billing: Pay-as-you-go to save costs, flexible expansion of network scale, and bandwidth to meet the growing network needs of enterprises.

3. Reduced latency: Provides low-latency, high-performance network to greatly improve user experience.

4. Real-time management: Users can monitor traffic in real-time through the platform.

5. Secure and reliable: Reliable network security protects user IT assets.

6. Legal and compliant: Complies with national laws and implements strict, detailed control processes.

Why CypressTel?

As a global leader in SD-WAN and security networking, CypressTel provides enterprises with SD-WAN networking, SASE security services, IDC data centers, cloud-network integration, cloud management, AIDC, and other services. Its business has covered North America, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and Mainland China, with multiple branch offices established in Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei, London, and Los Angeles. CypressTel has more than 120+ PoP points, 300+ cities network coverage, and serves over 10,000 customers. Its network solutions are widely used in finance, manufacturing, new energy, Internet, retail, logistics, and over 10 other industries. 

With the accelerating wave of smart manufacturing companies going global, SD-WAN application in the manufacturing industry is becoming more widespread and in-depth. Scenarios such as interconnection of branch offices, interconnection of data centers, optimization of production processes, remote equipment control, and IoT applications have become indispensable technical support for smart manufacturing companies in the process of globalization.

In the future, CypressTel will continue to cultivate the fields of SD-WAN and network security, providing global customers with a one-stop comprehensive network solution that makes the network "connection" faster, more secure, and more flexible.