SDV Medien+Service GmbH – The benefits of consolidation: A new homogenous IT structure

SDV Medien+Service GmbH – The benefits of consolidation: A new homogenous IT structure.

The SDV Group develops and produces individual and personalised print products at three locations, offering everything required for direct marketing—printing, improving and processing of dialogue media as well as campaign design and analysis. When it became time for SDV to consolidate their IT on the Dresden site, Bechtle reduced the number of vendors down to three, with the focus squarely on Cisco. The homogeneous IT structure enables compatible updates and integrated features are available throughout the entire system.

Project details.

Services

Managed Services
Dynamic Data Centre

Industry

Manufacturing

Manufacturer

Cisco

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Challenge.

Direct mail marketing has to be quickly, precisely and reliably produced and the data processed kept secure, which is why the SDV Group consistently invests in technological innovations. Only in this way is it possible for the company to keep up with the growing demands of the three locations in Dresden, Weidenberg and Bamberg. Central IT services such as cross-site management information systems plus the high-performance machinery used for offset/digital printing and processing need to be able to grow with the company’s dynamic ideas. In addition, it’s crucial that IT is highly-available and provisioned throughout the company. The technology used has to transmit the data required without an errors and in compliance with the provisions of the EU GDPR. Highly-available IT ensures secure processes for the SDV Group’s information logistics. As the leasing contract for the current IT infrastructure was coming to an end, SDV were on the look-out for a new concept which enabled them to keep their software environment, but upgrade to more future-ready hardware that would avoid redundancies and improve endpoint security.

Thanks to Bechtle’s highly committed employees, sales, project management and SDV collaborated perfectly. Extensive IT infrastructure planning with the sales staff helped us to ensure that there were no unforeseen surprises in the project implementation phase and everything went according to plan.

Jochen Schreib, Head of Central Services, SDV Medien+Service GmbH

Solution.

By consolidating 10 hardware manufacturers down to three, Bechtle was able to meet the SDV Group’s requirements. The Cisco networking solutions components leased from Bechtle Financial Services work perfectly together, cause fewer migration headaches, and require less support and fewer service calls.

Instead, Bechtle set up a reliable network across all three locations with dynamic routing and secure connections. The Cisco Security Solutions technology used ensures that hardware attacks are detected and prevented directly while permanent monitoring adds an additional layer of security. Cisco also has a perfect endpoint security solution that doesn’t only detect attacks, but also defends against them. Each device on the SDV network also has to authenticate itself. Introduced by Bechtle, Advanced Malware Security has everything in its sights—from servers and clients to mobile end devices.

SDV has added another layer of security against downtimes with a completely redundant architecture designed by Bechtle. Cisco Data Center Solutions ensures that the two data centres located in Dresden can act as surrogates for each other, keeping the data safe at all times. Bechtle also set up a completely new third data centre which houses the Cisco backup server that determines which data centre remains online in the event of an incident.

A disaster recovery test carried out by Bechtle demonstrated the high availability of the data for the entire SDV Group. The Weidenberg and Bamberg sites are connected redundantly to Dresden and are provisioned from there with the main applications.

Business benefits.

Consolidating the number of vendors down to three with a focus on Cisco means that all SDV hardware components work perfectly with each other, issues are easily fixed and there are both time and money savings.

Thanks to the leasing model, SDV pays a fixed amount every month to secure availability, integrity and confidentiality into the future.