Good Drinks Australia brews stronger network and security with Macquarie Telecom

The growing brewery business has strengthened network resilience to keep operations flowing.

Good Drinks Australia has partnered with Macquarie Telecom to overhaul its network and cybersecurity infrastructure, deploying an AI-powered SASE solution that is delivering measurable improvements in resilience, visibility and operational efficiency.

“It's a step-change that's required as the business grows significantly. Securing the business from attack and keeping the business turning is vital,” said Aaron Tighe, WA state director, Macquarie Telecom.

The business identified several underlying network challenges that were creating friction and increasing risk across its operations.

These included cloud archive rules creating unnecessary data storage growth, two misaligned authentication platforms, network resilience issues that occasionally disrupted backup access and gaps in firewall security.

“Friction and misalignment creates loops in process efficiency, and removing these ultimately reduces overheads and speeds up the ability to service customers,” Tighe told CRN Australia.

A network with no beer is bad for business

For a drinks business, any delay getting beverages into customers hands is bad for business and its reputation. Good Drinks IT manager, Kelly French, identified the gaps upon coming into the role, and tapped Macquarie as a known trusted partner to assist.

French, together with the Macquarie solutions architect, built a business case to address the issues. Macquarie proposed a SASE solution — a cloud-based platform that unifies networking and security by combining SD-WAN, zero trust access, firewall and secure web gateway.

“It allows for secure remote access via ZTNA and more flexibility in the ability for remote workers to safely access and use applications,” Tighe said.

The improved network capability means upgrades can now be handled without major disruptions.

“Things can get upgraded in the background, and everything else just keeps ticking along and the end-users don't see any issues,” French said.

Looking ahead, Good Drinks is considering expanding the partnership with additional connectivity solutions for mobile teams and the potential use of edge computing and hosting capabilities to support future growth.

The resilience lesson for organisations

While there is no way to guarantee the business won’t be attacked, Good Drinks has vastly strengthened its ability to defend and recover from incidents.

“If we do get compromised, we can show how we got compromised, where we got compromised and what we can do to correct the issue and try and prevent it from reoccurring in the future,” said French.

The lesson for other businesses is to strengthen resilience, yet many organisations still operate on the assumption they’re too small to be a target or not on the radar of attackers.

“Cybersecurity is one of those things that people say ‘it won’t happen to us – who would care about us’ until you are breached — then you think differently,” Tighe concluded.