Eramet is a global leader in natural resources mining and high-value transformation, with over 13,000 employees across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North America. The Eramet Group is a global mining leader has over 8,000 IT users accessing SaaS, private and cloud-hosted applications from 47 sites connected by a CASB-secured SD WAN.
Eramet is transforming their applications, IT systems and platforms:
- Transitioning key business applications to SaaS platforms
- Progressively shifting apps from Equinix data centers to Azure
- Optimizing performance of systems (like SAP) that will continue to be hosted in private clouds (internal and IaaS)
In parallel, WAN, cloud and SaaS connectivity was optimized to improve cost, performance and security:
- Deployed CASB (zScaler) to secure distributed sites and work from home employees
- Migrated MPLS to SD WAN for faster, local connections to SaaS and Azure
SD WAN Migration Risk and CASB Issues
Eramet employees using zScaler to access apps hosted in Azure were experiencing significant, recurring performance degradations that impacted productivity and business agility. An inability to effectively diagnose and resolve these issues confirmed they had insufficient visibility into and across their digital infrastructure.
The IT team also identified a strong risk that SD WAN migration would impact business processes and performance if they were unable to benchmark and maintain network performance to all sites, users, clouds and applications. Configuration of their SD WAN required in-depth insight to ensure its performance exceeded the MPLS network it was replacing.
Objectives
Eramet brought in Kadiska to address key IT-enabled business goals:
- Secure digital experience and application performance for all users during migration from MPLS to SD WAN.
- Achieve complete visibility into CASB and SD WAN network performance to accelerate MTTR.
Kadiska Solution
Kadiska was selected by Eramet for multiple reasons:
- Unique, agent-free real user monitoring deployment model
- Integrated digital experience, network path and performance monitoring
- Flexible (floating) licensing model optimized for SD WAN migration
Kadiska deployed a combination of digital experience monitoring and network performance monitoring components:
- User-Watcher collected digital experience metrics for all key apps
- Virtualized test stations monitored network route performance to zScaler, Azure zones, data centers, IaaS and SaaS applications.
Real-time digital experience and network performance metrics were monitored carefully before, during and after migration. By observing performance from connectivity and user experience perspectives Eramet rapidly resolved degradations and optimize SD WAN performance.
Results
Kadiska’s partner Lutessa worked alongside Eramet’s team, providing detailed reporting before and after each site migration to ensure:
- Uninterrupted site connectivity and business continuity
- No delays or cost overruns caused by unresolved performance degradations
- Fastest possible retirement of costly MPLS links
- A successful migration was confirmed
The Eramet team optimized SD WAN performance by identifying and prioritizing better-performing underlays to each destination.
Kadiska provided clear visibility into digital experience and network performance throughout our SD WAN migration. It was essential to delivering important cost and performance benefits to the business.
Christophe Veillat, Director of IT Operations, Eramet
Benefits
- Risk-free migration on time, in budget
- No business disruption during migration
- Optimized SD WAN performance to every site
Learn more about how Kadiska helps Eramet gain complete visibility into their SD WAN network and zScaler security platform performance to deliver amazing SaaS digital experience to their employees and partners.
