In today’s interconnected global economy, managing a sprawling network of hundreds of international sites and thousands of employees presents a monumental challenge for any enterprise’s IT department. For Darling Ingredients, a major global corporation with over 260 locations and 16,000 employees, this challenge was amplified by a fragmented and complex infrastructure cobbled together from multiple vendors. The company’s IT team previously juggled a patchwork of point solutions for critical functions, including SD-WAN, firewalls, URL filtering, and remote access VPN. This disjointed approach, reliant on three different vendors and four separate management consoles, created significant operational inefficiencies and potential security gaps across its 14 data centers. This kind of complexity is not just an administrative burden; it represents a tangible barrier to agility, scalability, and robust cybersecurity, forcing organizations to seek a more streamlined and integrated path forward.
A Strategic Shift to Unified Infrastructure
To address these challenges, Darling Ingredients embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of its network and security architecture, moving away from its legacy multi-vendor environment toward a single, cloud-native solution. The company consolidated its disparate networking and security tools onto a unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform, a strategic decision designed to simplify management, enhance visibility, and strengthen its security posture across the entire global enterprise. This transition marked a pivotal shift from managing multiple, siloed systems to operating within a holistic framework. By integrating core functions into one platform, the IT team gained a centralized point of control, eliminating the complexity and redundancy of navigating different consoles for threat response, policy updates, and network management. This unified approach provides the scalability and agility necessary to support a dynamic, distributed workforce and infrastructure without compromising on security or performance, laying a foundation for future growth.
Tangible Gains in Security and Operational Efficiency
The results of this strategic consolidation were both immediate and substantial, translating into significant financial savings and dramatic improvements in operational effectiveness. Darling Ingredients reported annual savings exceeding $750,000, a figure achieved by eliminating redundant vendor contracts, reducing licensing costs, and minimizing the need for external contractors. Beyond the financial benefits, the platform’s advanced security capabilities have been instrumental in protecting the organization, successfully blocking over two million threats per month. The efficiency of the security team saw a remarkable boost, with the time required for manual threat evaluation being reduced by 66%. Perhaps most impressively, the incident response process was fundamentally transformed. The number of personnel needed to resolve critical P1 incidents plummeted by up to 83%, with response teams shrinking from as many as twelve individuals down to a lean and effective team of two or three. This transformation demonstrated how a unified SASE framework not only fortified an organization’s defenses but also optimized its human and financial resources.
