Good Drinks Australia – one of the country’s largest independent brewers – has engaged Macquarie Telecom to significantly improve the firm’s network capabilities as it expands, and protect it from outages during peak trading seasons.
The partnership will strengthen network reliability and cyber security across Good Drinks’ operations, ensuring the business remains resilient during peak trading periods and periods of high operational demand.
Good Drinks is home to some of Australia’s biggest brands in the beer, cider and ready-to-drink (RTDs) categories.
The company has around 300 full-time employees nationally across manufacturing, sales, marketing, distribution and hospitality operations, with key sites in Western Australia and Queensland.
The brewer had encountered a significant rise in workloads and the number of employees required during its peak summer and holiday seasons.
Good Drinks wanted to reduce any risk of network issues or downtime which could affect product getting out the door and into consumers’ hands.
The business identified several underlying network challenges that were limiting efficiency and increasing risk. These included cloud archive rules creating unnecessary data storage growth, misalignment between two authentication platforms, network resilience issues that occasionally disrupted backup access, and gaps in firewall security.
“For a smaller brewery these issues would be less of a concern but as the business grew, we knew we needed better support and protection mechanisms,” said Kelly French, business system analyst and IT support IT manager at Good Drinks.
French said Macquarie Telecom presented a SASE (security access network edge) solution that would bring intelligence and security to Good Drinks’ networks, reducing risk while improving efficiency.
“Macquarie is the backbone of our network, and it allows us to contribute at a higher level within the company,” said French.
Also, French said the improved network capability allows the company to focus on business growth while maintaining confidence in the reliability of its underlying technology infrastructure.
“Recently we had a network upgrade, and we prepared for an outage to allow for the work, but nothing was disrupted. Background jobs weren’t affected. That’s what you want out of a network. Things can get upgraded in the background, and everything else just keeps ticking along and the end users don’t see any issues,” said French.
“Our cyber security posture is vastly improved. But if we do get compromised, we can show how we got compromised, where we got compromised, and what we can do to correct the issue and try and prevent it from reoccurring in the future,” she said.
The partnership has also strengthened governance and cyber security for Good Drinks by simplifying systems and consolidating services through a single provider.
Looking ahead, Good Drinks is exploring opportunities to expand the partnership with Macquarie Telecom, including additional connectivity solutions for mobile teams and the potential use of edge computing and hosting capabilities to support future growth.
