A Top Espresso Machine Maker Manages Firewalls Around the World Simply and Cost-Effectively with Forcepoint

Founded in 1902 as a small industrial parts manufacturing workshop, this household appliance manufacturer is grounded in the tradition of highend Italian craftsmanship. Its unique combination of quality, innovation and design have made the company a world leader in small household appliances, especially focused on espresso coffee machines.

While still based in Italy, the company’s activities have expanded to be geographically diversified, with commercial presences in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia / Pacific and plans to expand in that market further. It relies on four production sites, located in Italy, Romania and China, as well as a joint venture plant with the TCL group in China. Worldwide, the company operates 33 branches in as many countries, with a 2-billion-Euro annual turnover and a workforce of just over 8,500.

The company never forgets its focus on its customers, and its goal is to offer consumers innovative home appliances with a distinctive combination of style and performance. The company wants to turn “the everyday into something special” and make each person’s life a little simpler with innovative solutions to their domestic needs.

A complex network requires simplified management

As the company has grown and expanded, its global network has become increasingly complex, connecting its own branches as well as partner operations and offsite backups. It needed a more effective and efficient way to deliver comprehensive, secure connectivity and visibility across that network.

The company also wanted to be more agile and cost-effective in its internet connectivity by replacing costly MPLS connections and avoiding being locked into service from a specific carrier. In order to find a solution that could help, the company’s focus on quality products led it to seek out the top-ranked firewall for security, which also includes built-in enterprise-class SD-WAN capability: Forcepoint NGFW.

The world’s top espresso machine maker turns to the number-one-ranked firewall

“The competence we found, along with the leadership certified by reports of analysts and security experts from NSS Labs and NGIPS, certainly helped convince us to choose Forcepoint,” emphasized the company’s Web System and Network Administrator.

Forcepoint NGFW offers several features that make it the ideal security solution for complex networks. The easy-to-use Forcepoint Security Management Center (SMC) gives quick access to the main features, provides dashboards with valuable overviews, and allows all policy updates to be sent from a single management interface. Management costs can be lowered considerably by avoiding the need to individually manage firewalls at different sites. And Forcepoint NGFW’s zero-touch deployment allows easy set up without requiring an on-site technician.

Forcepoint NGFW also includes full-featured, cost-effective and scalable SD-WAN connectivity built in. SD-WAN is a networking technology that uses software to make wide area networks more flexible by connecting sites directly to the internet over whichever commodity broadband links are most appropriate in each location. The combination of connectivity and security in one product allows the company to replace costly MPLS connections at branch locations with broadband DSL links.

“For protection and more efficient management of the network, we opted for the Next Generation Firewall, in order to improve the provisioning, guarantee us uniformity of policy, and have a unified view of all the tools used,” explained the administrator.

Managing more than a hundred firewalls around the world, with the touch of a button

With Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall in place, the company is now able to centralize security management, allowing greatly simplified updates and policies as well as greater visibility into network issues.

“With Forcepoint, we now easily manage more than a hundred firewalls deployed all around the world – from Chile all way to New Zealand – with low effort and high affordability,” explained the administrator.

The move to SD-WAN delivered cost-savings and improved ability to adjust connections and carriers as needed. “From the infrastructure point of view, we have moved from expensive MPLS technology to the more flexible SD-WAN,” he said. In addition, users have seen an improvement in the performance of the internet, while security specialists have been able to save time previously devoted to operational management to focus on more strategic projects.

“The return on investment was faster than expected and we also noticed considerable improvements both from the point of view of the acceleration of the business and of the time saved,” he said. “Alongside the cost reduction, we appreciate the greater ease of interconnection between the offices and the integration of new functions in the existing infrastructure.”

The company has since added Web Security to improve protection while employees access the internet. Looking toward the future, the company is taking initial steps into digital transformation with plans to move operations to the cloud applications, with Forcepoint its security partner.