As the largest retail brand in the Czech Republic, Albert is dedicated to helping customers “eat better.” Each of its 350+ supermarkets and hypermarkets provide a top-notch shopping experience for local communities—and every one of those shopping experiences is underpinned by a highly distributed network of 1,500+ devices. As Albert embarked on a slew of ambitious digital transformation projects, they knew they needed a reliable and centralized way to govern their network. Enter: IP Fabric’s automated network assurance platform. 

Ensuring a Smooth, Secure Project Rollout

As they prepared to roll out digital transformation projects like Cisco ACI, SD-WAN, microsegmentation, and more, Albert’s network team needed a way to ensure that every change brought them closer to their goals, instead of causing unintended risks. But with a network as complex as theirs, that’s easier said than done. 

“We have a really heterogeneous network with lots of vendors,” explains Radovan Vojtek, Network Manager. “It was tricky to get different technologies and systems to communicate with each other.” 

For a business at Albert’s scale, network behavior could change overnight, creating a rift between network documentation and the network’s actual state. What Albert needed was a reliable source of truth—and they found it in IP Fabric. 

After installation, IP Fabric discovered and mapped Albert’s digital infrastructure from core to cloud to edge, all in a matter of minutes. Now, Albert’s network team starts every day by running a new snapshot of every device, connection, and configuration in their network. 

“IP Fabric is a tool we use on a daily basis,” says Andrej Puškáč, Network Specialist. “It’s the first tool I run in the morning because I can see what changed during the night. Before, if I wanted to check the status of the network, I’d need to use several tools. IP Fabric is the first tool that has integrated everything to create a complete picture of the network.”

In addition to taking daily snapshots, IP Fabric also delivers the visibility to run end-to-end path lookups to ensure that traffic patterns are flowing as they should. That means no bypassed firewalls, no misrouted traffic, and no misconfigured security controls. These path lookups also serve as timestamped evidence of compliance with internal security and audit processes, which can be easily exported to executives and auditors alike. 

“With IP Fabric’s normalized network insights, even colleagues who aren’t admins of dedicated vendor systems can see if their traffic will pass from an app server through this kind of service,” says Vojtek. “And they can use it by themselves, without our assistance.” In other words, by empowering other teams to self-serve network insights, IP Fabric freed up Albert’s network team to tackle the most high-impact projects.

Keeping Projects on Schedule and Under Budget

As a part of their broader digital transformation initiative, Albert recently upgraded 1,500+ switches across their network. Step 1). Identify any switches in need of retirement. Step 2). Ensure that all new switches are configured according to business intent. 

“Before IP Fabric, we had most—but not all—of the information,” explains Vojtek. “We could plan some budget for switches and replacements, but if we didn’t know about some forgotten switches, that’s a cost of $20k.” 

IP Fabric prevented these unseen costs by generating a complete and accurate inventory of all the devices in Albert’s network, surfacing End-of-Life (EoL), End-of-Maintenance (EoM), and End-of-Sale (EoS) data in the process. 

“You can run inventory checks from accounting and serial numbers, so you can see if devices have been removed,” says Puškáč. From there, the Albert team runs a series of IP Fabric’s 160+ built-in and custom intent checks to surface any baseline misconfigurations for prompt remediation. 

“It’s also useful to have EoL, EoM, and EoS data for planning future device replacements and budgets,” says Vojtek. “If we need to replace a switch in two years, we’ll know. If someone moved a device from one location to another, we’ll know.” 

With the success of their latest upgrade, Albert plans to implement next-gen firewalls in the coming year. 

“IP Fabric is ideal for this project because it can measure our progress daily,” says Vojtek. “We use IP Fabric as our source of truth. It’s the anchor for our environment.”

Planning a digital transformation project like SD-WAN? Get in touch with the IP Fabric team today!