Case Study
Energy & Petroleum Industry
Petroleum Distribution Company Modernization & Support
A wholesale petroleum distribution company with commercial, state and federal contracts sought Cypac’s guidance to modernize and streamline their infrastructure, support users and locations across multiple locations and to meet DoD and PCI compliance requirements.
The Challenge
The company is multi-generational and has grown from a family run business to a state-wide company that has not only grown with traction over time but through acquisition of companies in their industry. Standardization, modernization and growth with the mindset of focusing on helping their customer succeed was the primary motivating factor in updating and streamlining their infrastructure. In addition, having essential cybersecurity safeguards was not only necessary to maintain compliance as required in their contracts, but to minimize the chance of an incident as they are a critical infrastructure target for cyber criminals.
The Solution
The customer’s multiple sites were connected using Watchguard firewalls and VPN tunnels. Unfortunately the aging, end-of life equipment did not meet the FIPS 140-2 encryption standards required for compliance and did not have many of the A-grade protection safeguards that made the business feel safe defending against modern threats. The solution was to replace the Watchguard devices with PaloAlto equipment. PaloAlto not only did a better job in keeping their infrastructure secure, but retained traffic data so that analysis and monitoring by a 24x7 SOC team could be done. Also, the best-in-class Cortex XDR was installed on all workstations, laptops and servers and GlobalProtect VPN for remote workers to ensure that internet traffic is encrypted, no matter where they might be traveling.
The wireless infrastructure was changed from a mix of legacy and SOHO equipment that caused endless frustration for end users. They were all replaced with UniFi access points and adopted to a cloud hosted central management portal. Wireless access was segmented between a corporal LAN, guest LAN, corporate IOT devices (such as printers) and ICS devices (such as digital signs).
Legacy file servers were consolidated and migrated to Microsoft Sharepoint, a service the client was already paying for with their Microsoft 365 license but was not utilizing, print servers were virtualized and moved to a local datacenter and a handful of legacy systems running on aging hardware were virtualized and either moved to the datacenter or onto newer server hardware at their central office. All end-of-life hardware was decommissioned and securely disposed of as e-waste and end of life software and servers were virtualized and segmented from the rest of the network to mitigate risk. The backup systems were updated to a more modern and reliable system that required less ongoing management and allowed for remote spin-ups of backups in the event of a disaster.
The Impact
To augment the capabilities of the IT support staff, Cypac made themselves available for end-user support, assisting users with email, printing, software troubleshooting, employee on/off boarding and network access requests. This freed up the IT department to focus on company growth projects such as expansion and business intelligence, which were vital for the organization’s growth.
A large portion of Cypac’s contribution was assisting the client with documentation and IT processes. A knowledge base was assembled based on common IT scenarios, documentation was created and maintained of the client’s network, inventory (asset management)
