
Food and Beverage
Carlsberg Group Gains Flexibility and Visibility with Cato SASE


Beer has been a part of human culture for centuries. People often like to enjoy a cold one when socializing with friends, sharing experiences, and creating memories.
In the past, the process of making beer was largely manual, but today, among major brewers, the processes are mostly automated. This high level of automation makes data and network connectivity the lifeblood of the company. From people to machines, everyone and everything requires constant connectivity to produce beer at a consistently high level of quality.
Such is the case for Carlsberg Group, the third-largest brewer in the world. The company’s operations span North America, Europe, and Asia. More than 40,000 people work across over 300 locations to make 140 brands and 700 different types of beer under the Carlsberg umbrella. Automation is essential for such a large global operation, and a flexible, scalable, and secure network is crucial to support business needs.
And with any brand as recognized as Carlsberg, security is paramount. Good network security starts with good visibility. After all, you can’t secure what you can’t see. “At the time we started our technology transformation journey in 2022, we had a very fragmented network, with different solutions and different providers in each of our regions,” says Tal Arad, Chief Information Security Officer for Carlsberg Group. “With multiple security appliances, visibility was limited. We had to maintain multiple sets of security policies, which increased complexity and risk. Our network limitations made it difficult to implement Zero Trust consistently.”
The network was a problem in other ways. “It was very painful to set up a new location because of frequent delays in MPLS installation. VPN performance into China was a problem because of strict government regulation. Across regions, the Internet-based SD-WAN connecting locations was unsuitable for VoIP and Office 365. “We had to manage the network manually by going through numerous consoles and services,” says Laurent Gaertner, Global Director for Network, Cloud and Hosting at Carlsberg.
Given the company’s vision to increase operational efficiency, Single-vendor SASE seemed the obvious choice. The team wanted an end-to-end SASE solution, but most companies they consulted offered a less cohesive solution, requiring them to stack different elements to constitute a SASE model. Carlsberg preferred a fully unified solution like the Cato SASE Cloud Platform, so they conducted a proof of concept in several regions.
“The PoC with Cato was straightforward. We set it up in Western Europe and Hong Kong, and we had a fully functioning network within just a few days,” says Gaertner. Says Tal, “The head of technology for our Asian region called and said, ‘We got Cato. We plugged it in, and the damn thing just works!’”
Carlsberg’s Network Roll-out Was Straightforward and Easy
Tal and his team had four months to roll out the Cato SASE Cloud Platform in Western Europe to about 140 locations with 200 different circuits, which they achieved ahead of schedule. At times, they brought 20 to 30 locations onto Cato a week. Today, the Carlsberg network spans over 220+ sites and 15,000 users.
“What we currently use are the networking capabilities of the Cato SASE Cloud Platform that includes SD-WAN, WAN optimization, global private backbone, as well as remote connectivity with SDP. Now, our users are always connected, always protected,” Gaertner says. “Network management and configuration used to be a major pain point for us because of the disjointed nature of the old network. With the Cato Management Application, we have a single pane of glass where we can make changes and propagate them throughout the network in a couple of minutes.”
Bringing new locations on board is much easier now, enabling IT to better serve the business in a more rapid and agile way. “We often have people from the supply chain that open new warehouses to be closer to our customers. We usually have less than a month to connect a warehouse,” says Gaertner. “Now we can have Cato up and running in a couple of days.” What’s more, he adds that the location in China is served well by a local Cato PoP, eliminating the old VPN problems while maintaining compliance with local regulations.
Overall, working with Cato empowered Carlsberg to shift resources to what matters most: support the business. “Working with Cato means we have one provider to support us from end-to-end,” says Gaertner. “This allows us to focus on improving the user experience and answering to business requirements much faster than we had previously.”
Full Visibility Makes Everything for IT Better
“We’re in the final stages of deploying the Cato platform globally, but we can already see how much it changes our lives for the better,” says Arad. “The best example I can give is the visibility. Every site we connect to the Cato network becomes part of the global topography. We can look at the network live at any given time. We know exactly what’s happening, not just on each site but on each laptop level. Every device connecting to the network gets checked for its health posture, what it needs to access, and whether it’s eligible. This level of visibility is one of the biggest benefits Cato has given us.”
With the legacy network, Arad says the lack of global visibility made it hard to do preventive maintenance and troubleshooting when problems occurred. “We recently had an incident that would have taken us days to understand under the old setup,” he says. “With Cato, we were able to identify the issue in a few hours and solve it quite quickly. That alone makes it worth deploying the Cato platform.”
Arad says having unified security and network makes it easier for Carlsberg to run its day-to-day operations from a single console. “Our understanding of what’s actually happening on our network is much better now. When we have an issue, we can see quickly whether it’s an operational or a security issue, and we get the right people to address it. Cato has brought us much closer to our vision of how security should look within Carlsberg.”
Says Arad. “Cato makes our life really easy and helps us protect our business even further. With this platform, we have a single pane of glass and can monitor everything, and have the right data to help us understand what’s happening on our network and in our business.”
About Carlsberg Group
Carlsberg adopted Cato in 2023, ran a pilot, and prepared for a phased rollout in 2024. Today, Carlsberg’s Cato deployment spans over 220+ sites and 15,000 users.