Borusan Holding drives greater efficiencies across 230 locations with single-pane-of-glass visibility

March 28, 2023

"We now have a single-pane-of-glass view of our whole network. This level of visibility means we can explain operations to C-levels, and all Borusan Holding locations automatically get outputs from the solutions in use. Everything has become clear because our infrastructure is populated by SolarWinds." Gokay Kaya Group IT Infrastructure Sr. Manager

ABOUT BORUSAN HOLDING

Borusan Holding A. Ş. is a Turkish industrial group headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey. Boasting operations in 12 countries and partnerships with industry leaders such as Mannesmann, BMW, Caterpillar, EnBW, and ArcelorMittal, Borusan Holding’s continued success seems assured as the company prepares to celebrate its eightieth anniversary in 2024.

CHALLENGES

During the past several decades of growth, the challenge and complexity of Borusan Holding’s data management and infrastructure transparency had intensified, says Gokay Kaya, network infrastructure manager at the company’s Istanbul headquarters. Providing IT services and support to the approximately 13,000 employees within the conglomerate and the 10 entities under Borusan Holding’s ownership had become unmanageable.

Visibility of the sprawling organization’s environment grew to be so spotty it was similar to “navigating a vehicle down a foggy road,” according to Kaya.

After transitioning components of their IT workloads to the cloud over a decade ago, the degree of the challenge became apparent. Despite taking full advantage of the managed services and monitoring capabilities available on Amazon Web Services® (AWS® ), end-to-end control seemed frustratingly out of reach. Maintaining a strong customer experience for their distributed workforce using over 3,500 devices at 230 locations remained an elusive aspiration despite support within top management and the boardroom.

“With five years on AWS, we were able to directly configure the available toolsets and drill down into the databases, applications, and microservices in use, but we realized we needed a different, more comprehensive approach,” Kaya recalls.

Among the concerns from an operational perspective was achieving uniformity in data management, version control of applications, and data integrity. Most troubling was a gnawing lack of confidence in the existing quality of IT security. Functioning as a conglomerate in multiple countries exposed Borusan Holding to potential cyberattacks, ransomware, phishing, and other threats.

Effectively mitigating these vulnerabilities would require a complete rethinking of how data was collected, stored, and shared across business units and with partner entities.

“Our monitoring was insufficient to assure us of end-to-end coverage, and we didn’t have a dashboard view of the health of our networks,” Kaya states. “When an anomaly occurred or something went down, it was hard to prioritize because of all the false alert triggers. This was equally relevant to operational efficiency and infrastructure security.”

In seeking better approaches and more meaningful insights, Borusan Holding’s IT leadership didn’t have to look too far afield. When Kaya arrived at the thriving conglomerate in 2012 as the newly appointed network infrastructure manager, he discovered an existing portfolio of SolarWinds solutions in place.

"We had a full complement of world-class solutions; they just had never been implemented fully or working very effectively to deliver the benefits they were capable of providing." — Gokay Kaya Group IT Infrastructure Sr. Manager

SOLUTION

Among the goals of Kaya’s IT strategy is providing optimal transparency to C-level executives while automating the spinning up of new hardware, applications, and services. To assist with the ongoing effort to gain greater visibility of the environment, Borusan Holding management brought in IT services consultant Ramazan Karadavut, founder and senior architect at ConSolit. Working together, they devised a strategy to extend their ability to support end users in the various entities under the Borusan Holding umbrella.

"SolarWinds has very flexible and stable solutions. They also offer easy integration with third-party platforms"

Executive Dashboard: We provide all stakeholders with a manager dashboard showing critical down devices and the entire environment—down to an individual company level—in an executive and summarized output.

“We can automatically create all access points like a node without touching anything,” Karadavut states. “Each team—VoIP, WAN, security, and others—has dedicated dashboards, including at the C-level with scheduled report dashboards. We can create custom properties automatically—fully automated integration.”

Another of Kaya and Karadavut’s key achievements was creating an automated process to bring new sites online. Integrating the existing IT assets of acquired entities as the organization expands into new markets previously required a lot of upfront work to identify and monitor these assets. It’s up to Kaya and his core team of eight network engineers to carefully review and respond to each unique situation.

Kaya and Karadavut created scripts and dashboards to make this process automated and simple.

“It’s our job to create structures for our remote locations, and we create some dependencies that all work automatically,” Karadavut states. “For example, when someone at a remote location adds a device, we simply ask them to flag it. Then, one of our created scripts creates a container or a group in SolarWinds, which automatically links WAN or wireless, and it updates the group, location, and availability.”

BENEFITS

Kaya and Karadavut have implemented several essential operational improvements to increase visibility, reduce alert noise, and automate key workflows. With these solutions in place, Borusan Holding has a tight, efficient monitoring solution.

"When I wake up and take my coffee, I open my SolarWinds page before my mail." — Gokay Kaya Group IT Infrastructure Sr. Manager

Today, he credits the firm’s extensive portfolio of SolarWinds solutions for simplifying the process of adding new devices and ensuring security and integration integrity across the environment.

For their next project, Kaya and Karadavut are continuing to evolve their hybrid cloud strategy, including an evaluation of SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability. “We’re beginning some cloud monitoring with SolarWinds as we’ve started to migrate some assets and infrastructure,” Kaya says.

Groups Summary

CHALLENGES MET, PROBLEMS SOLVED

Reduced Alert Noise: “If you wake up and you can have a hundred alerts, it's difficult to figure out, ‘Okay, what happened here?’ The way SolarWinds grouped it all together, you get one or two alerts, making it easy to understand very quickly what needs to be done to fix the problem.”
Single-Pane-of-Glass Dashboard: “Now that our managers have highly configured dashboards, they can see critical down devices, the number of devices they manage at the company level, and the number of devices at the device type level. This dashboard is a very executive and useful output for us.”
IT Service Management (ITSM) Service Catalog: “We offer pre-configured, ITIL-compliant resources to all of our business units, so we have nicely matched metrics, and they can easily provide their customers with uniformly configured services and data templates.”
Automated Node Configuration: “We can automatically create all access points (like a node) without touching anything. We can create custom properties automatically. Fully automated integration.”