How Ip.Glass overhauled Baiada Poultry’s network resilience

When minutes matter, poultry business needed to eliminate possible downtime.

For Baiada Poultry, seconds and minutes matter. Its business is complex, fast‑moving and unforgiving of downtime. Even small network disruptions can be costly.

As one of the county’s largest poultry producers, its operations run 24x7 across breeding farms, feed mills, processing plants and distribution facilities. A weighbridge outage, for example, could back up trucks and halt feed delivery to farms almost immediately.

“Continuity of supply is everything to us,” said Wayne Ellison, CIO, Baiada.

Baiada turned to Ip.Glass to adopt Fortinet Security Fabric, which unified its firewall, SD‑WAN, switching and wireless IT and OT infrastructure in one centrally managed architecture. It needed to improve control, visibility and resilience across its network to prevent any possible downtime.

“The challenge was not simply one of security — it was about gaining the granular control and redundancy needed to allow the IT team to work on individual components without risk to the broader environment,” said Semyon Taskin, MD, Ip.Glass.

The critical first step to separate IT and OT

The critical first step was network segmentation designed to isolate critical systems and ensure operational continuity in the event of a compromise or other cyber incident.

“Establishing clear boundaries between IT and OT is the foundation that makes everything else possible,” Taskin told CRN Australia.

Taskin explained that OT requires a different operational lens to IT because “availability comes first” in production systems because any interruptions have immediate business impact.

Visibility must also be built in from the outset and consolidated across both IT and OT. The implementation of a security operations capability using FortiAnalyzer has enabled Baiada Poultry’s IT team to shift from reactive issues resolution to proactive monitoring and optimisation.

IT/OT modernisation, according to Taskin, should be treated as an evolving capability rather than a one-time engagement.

“The value compounds over time as the team learns to trust what the platform is telling them and builds on a stable foundation,” he said.

Reducing operational complexity and pressure on IT teams

Operating geographically dispersed sites across demanding physical environments with a small IT team was a significant operational burden on Baiada Poultry. There was also the pressure to reduce management overheads.

Taskin said when organisations adopt an ecosystem rather than point products it simplifies operational and security complexity. It does this by doing away with “the problem of separate policy models, separate visibility planes and integrations” that may not share information reliably when it matters most.

“An incident that crosses those boundaries, which most real incidents do, becomes significantly harder to detect and contain [with separate solutions],” he said.

“A unified architecture like Fortinet's Security Fabric means a single policy model, a consistent telemetry stream and enforcement that holds from the network edge through to the data centre,” he continued.

For businesses managing geographically dispersed sites and demanding physical environments, Taskin said central management is what makes the estate governable at scale.

“It also means an IT team can maintain meaningful oversight across the entire environment without being dependent on per-site institutional knowledge,” he said.