During the past several decades of growth, the challenge and complexity of Borusan Holding’s data management and infrastructure transparency had intensified, says Gokay Kaya, network infrastructure manager at the company’s Istanbul headquarters. Providing IT services and support to the approximately 13,000 employees within the conglomerate and the 10 entities under Borusan Holding’s ownership had become unmanageable.

After transitioning components of their IT workloads to the cloud over a decade ago, the degree of the challenge became apparent. Despite taking full advantage of the managed services and monitoring capabilities available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), end-to-end control seemed frustratingly out of reach. Maintaining a strong customer experience for their distributed workforce using over 3,500 devices at 230 locations remained an elusive aspiration despite support within top management and the boardroom.

“With five years on AWS, we were able to directly configure the available toolsets and drill down into the databases, applications, and microservices in use, but we realized we needed a different, more comprehensive approach,” Kaya recalls.

Among the concerns from an operational perspective was achieving uniformity in data management, version control of applications, and data integrity. Most troubling was a gnawing lack of confidence in the existing quality of IT security. Functioning as a conglomerate in multiple countries exposed Borusan Holding to potential cyberattacks, ransomware, phishing, and other threats.

Effectively mitigating these vulnerabilities would require a complete rethinking of how data was collected, stored, and shared across business units and with partner entities.

“Our monitoring was insufficient to assure us of end-to-end overage, and we didn’t have a dashboard view of the health of our networks,” Kaya states. “When an anomaly occurred or something went down, it was hard to prioritize because of all the false alert triggers. This was equally relevant to operational efficiency and infrastructure security.”

Solution

When Kaya arrived at Borusan Holding in 2012 as the newly appointed network infrastructure manager, among the goals of his IT strategy was providing optimal transparency to executives while automating the spinning up of new hardware, applications, and services. To assist with the ongoing effort to gain greater visibility of the environment, Borusan Holding management brought in an IT services consultant. Working together, they devised a strategy to extend their ability to support end users in the various entities under the Borusan Holding umbrella.

Each team—VoIP, WAN, security, and others—has dedicated dashboards and scheduled reporting. Custom properties can be created automatically.

Another key achievement of the cooperation was creating an automated process to bring new sites online. Integrating the existing IT assets of acquired entities as the organization expands into new markets previously required a lot of upfront work to identify and monitor these assets. It’s up to Kaya and his core team of eight network engineers to carefully review and respond to each unique situation. Engineers created scripts and dashboards to make this process automated and simple.

Benefits

The IT-experts have implemented several essential operational improvements to increase visibility, reduce alert noise, and automate key workflows. With these solutions in place, Borusan Holding has a tight, efficient monitoring solution.

Today, he credits the firm’s extensive portfolio of SolarWinds solutions for simplifying the process of adding new devices and ensuring security and integration integrity across the environment.

For its next project, the company is continuing to evolve its hybrid cloud strategy, including an evaluation of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, as it started to migrate some assets and infrastructure.

The following SolarWinds Platform capabilities have benefited Borusan Holding:

Reduced Alert Noise: The way SolarWinds grouped it all together, you get one or two alerts, making it easy to understand very quickly what needs to be done to fix the problem.

Single-Pane-of-Glass Dashboard: Highly configured dashboards, provide visibility for critical devices, the number of devices managed at the company level, and the number of devices at the device type level.

IT Service Management (ITSM) Service Catalog: Pre-configured, ITIL-compliant resources to all business units.

Automated Node Configuration: Automatically create all access points (like a node) without touching anything.

Source

230 Locations With Single-Pane-of-Glass Visibility