A European private equity firm owns the customer. The firm requires simplified management and standardization across the organizations it acquires. They had various networking solutions and internet services, making management for the lean IT department miserable. With one or two resources in each country, the team was spread thin and desperately needed to standardize their networking equipment and internet services. Between legacy HP, Aruba, Cisco, and Dell networking equipment, IT could not effectively administer their networks. With footprints of 4-6 locations spread across the US, Canada, and Mexico, their team was also unable to reliably visit sites to keep up with maintenance and cloud migration initiatives.

In the beginning, CornerStone was engaged to support their locations in the Americas. Recently, we’ve been asked to provide services to their sites in East Asia and the Philippines. We’ve been tasked with standardizing their networking solutions with an additional management layer, delivering standardized data connections, and ongoing consulting and support services.

Having acquired each location, the customer had a disparate deployment of internet and private data service contracts. We were initially asked to identify the service agreements and contractual commitments across the Americas. We deployed standardized internet and hybrid private/data circuits to protect the customers from early termination fees per location. We had to be mindful of the customer’s roadmap, as they were moving off of their on-prem servers and data storage, focusing on cloud-based production environments tied to Europe’s Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft. At the end of the carrier consolidation and clean-up project, we successfully deployed reliable bandwidth to every location in the Americas.

As of 2024, the customer has engaged CornerStone to source and support data deployments to their East and Southeast Asian locations (S Korea, Japan, and the Philippines).

Due to the number of acquisitions, the customer didn’t have a standardized networking manufacturer deployed across their locations. Some sites had 10+ year-old, unsupported HP and Dell equipment. Others had newer Aruba and Cisco gear, but their IT team couldn’t keep up with the administration of each product stack.

Understanding that the customer aimed to simplify their network stack, we proposed Cisco’s Meraki product line. The customer didn’t have complex routing requirements now that production and storage were cloud-hosted, and their geography necessitated remote management capability. Although we could have made several different products work, the customer was pleased with the ease of management that Meraki provided. We ultimately scoped and deployed a handful of switches and APs per location and Meraki SASE appliances in single and HA configurations, depending on site size. Delivering equipment to the US and Canada was relatively simple, but the customer needed additional support navigating shipping and deployment to Mexico. Due to shortages at the time, we couldn’t get our hands on the chosen Meraki models in Mexico. CornerStone brought shipping vendors, Cisco Meraki, and their local team together to facilitate a clean transition through customs and deliver the services on time.

The customer was also looking for long-term service and management contracts. CornerStone brought a trusted managed service provider to take over the day-to-day ticketing and maintenance to meet their 5+ year request. CornerStone remains engaged in architectural conversations and meets with the MSP and the customer on regular cadence calls.

As of 2024, the customer is now engaging CornerStone to provide the same networking services to their East and Southeast Asia locations (S Korea, Japan, and the Philippines).

In Q1 ’23, the customer was breached and ransomed due to a weak security posture and outdated equipment. Although the customer had purchased a new Meraki firewall and routing appliances, they had not yet addressed their internal network and other security solutions. The attack originated as a phishing campaign, where an employee inadvertently brought the malware into the network. The malware spread, targeting servers and network infrastructure. Due to the age of the equipment, OS and firmware updates weren’t maintained, and the attacker could easily lock the customer out.

CornerStone was engaged to help remediate the network-related ransom attack. We quickly sourced switches and APs to set up a new and segmented LAN. Within two weeks of being engaged, we were able to set up their headquarters and local offices, bringing the customer back into production.

The customer engages CornerStone on ad hoc consulting engagements, including ongoing carrier consulting, project management, and network design projects.