In its drive for operational excellence and higher productivity, PETRONAS ICT identified the following challenges:
In an era of mobility and IoT, managing network access for users and devices in the PETRONAS network is a big challenge. There are constant changes. Meanwhile, ad-hoc manual changes to configurations lead to inconsistent security across networks and added vulnerabilities.
PETRONAS ICT wants to further limit their already low (2-3 per month) frequency of network glitches.
“The frequency of network glitches was never a matter of concern. But imagine if you have to submit a multi billion-dollar tender at a fixed time and that is exactly when the network doesn’t work. We can’t afford to have any downtime, and rely on time-consuming, error-prone manual fixes.” said Hafizan Habeeb Rahman, Head of Business Function - Infrastructure at PETRONAS ICT.
The deployment and configuration of devices was lengthy, arduous and inefficient.
For example, it took up to 2 months to deploy and configure switches in the Twin Towers, which have 88 floors. Upgrading configurations across the company could take more than 6 months. The traditional methods used for policy administration are difficult to implement and maintain. And it is a daunting task to implement network policies based on user/device identity.
Deployment, configuration, testing and maintenance were handled manually. This meant a large pool of engineers was required at all times. Human interaction led to excessive man hours and high operational cost.
PETRONAS ICT strives to provide a high-quality communication experience to optimize staff productivity. But it was difficult and time-consuming to tailor configurations.
Changes in quality of service took several months to plan and implement. Meanwhile, the lack of implementation caused performance issues in business-critical applications.
The significant size and complexity of networks under the current network paradigm meant that when a failure occurred, pinpointing and resolving the issues could take a lot of effort and time. This was because a large amount of data collected from multiple systems was not properly correlated.
Recognizing the challenges above, the Infrastructure team began a mission to build a new network. PETRONAS ICT presented their issues and expectations to Cisco.
The Cisco team proposed the Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA), an open, extensible, software-driven network architecture. PETRONAS ICT was particularly interested in the Cisco Software-Defined Access (SD Access), a new network architecture built on the principles of Cisco DNA.
Find out more in the next section.
