American Showa

At any factory, downtime is expensive. "If we shut down for a customer such as Honda, that’s 10 grand a minute," says Sean Henry, senior manager of auto parts manufacturer American Showa.

A recent ransomware attack is one example. The highly sophisticated attack revealed the company’s aging infrastructure. "The people behind the ransomware had a help desk line, where they could tell you how to get bitcoin. These are literally corporate pirates—their whole business strategy is figuring out how to do evil more efficiently," Henry recalls.

Henry met with the NetApp team, who recommended NetApp HCI as the platform to consolidate aging hardware in the company’s infrastructure into one secure and scalable private cloud. The team also suggested that another NetApp HCI might provide an efficient high-speed platform for the company’s manufacturing execution system (MES).

The biggest benefits come back to security and progress. "We've been able to shore up a critical vulnerability in our infrastructure. We've been able to improve the performance of the applications, and we've been able to provide better management of the overall infrastructure than what we had. And the fact that we can move forward on MES and can make good on that commitment—I would say that makes management very relieved. We’ve been able to achieve the performance goals that were put forward for us."