Manufacturing

Legacy links to unified fabric

With a massive global workforce and business infrastructure in thousands of branch offices and hundreds of factories, warehouses, and distribution hubs, plus three data centers, Nestlé’s enterprise network is vital to its operations. For many years, the company relied on expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) links that were difficult to scale and manage, especially with the migration of most Nestlé applications to the cloud beginning in 2022. Fragmented management tools made it difficult to troubleshoot latency issues, manage traffic between branches and four cloud providers, and ensure a consistent experience for cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Managing diverse security compliance requirements across global sites was also difficult with MPLS architecture.

“Any interruption of the network could trigger a massive business impact, because if applications stop working, our factories stop producing and we can’t ship our products on time,” says Matteo di Maggio, Global Head of Networking for Nestlé.

Nestlé turned to Cisco to provide a centralized cloud backbone, encompassing one of the largest software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) multi-region fabric (MRF) solutions ever deployed. The Cisco SD-WAN MRF can be managed on a single dashboard with centralized visibility into all traffic using Cisco ThousandEyes. Cisco Secure Routers provide stronger WAN security, quantum-safe cryptography, integrated threat protection, and other security and control features.

“With our Cisco SD-WAN MRF, Cisco ThousandEyes, and Cisco Secure Routing, we can dynamically route and monitor traffic across multiple clouds and providers with security and policy management baked into the fabric itself,” says Ralf Huebenthal, Global Head of IT Platforms. “This level of control and intelligence is critically important for a business as distributed and dynamic as Nestlé. This is how we run 1700 production sites and offices worldwide, seamlessly connecting through three global regions, three data centers, and four public cloud environments.”

Connectivity without limitations

With the SD-WAN architecture from Cisco, Nestlé has transformed its global network into a unified, resilient, and high-performing ecosystem. Dynamic traffic optimization—including application-aware routing—ensures that critical business applications and supply chain systems are routed via the best paths available based on real-time network conditions. Application performance has improved at Nestlé by an estimated 35-40% thanks to reduced latency. Security has been enhanced with built-in encryption and centralized compliance controls, and the network now consistently maintains 99.97% availability.

“SD-WAN provides internet connectivity without any limitations,” says Giovanni di Marzio, SD-WAN Architect at Nestlé. “You create your own overlay to run any transport network infrastructure with the freedom and flexibility to pick and choose the network architecture for each office and region. And instead of looking at every log for 2000 routers, we have a single dashboard to manage the network and a centralized platform for orchestrating configurations across all Nestlé sites.”

“In the last two years, we decreased our support tickets and critical incidents by 80%, which is amazing,” said Andrea Castano, Senior Platform Manager for Connectivity Products at Nestlé. “We are able to deliver different types of reliable network services wherever they are needed. It’s one overlay that can use any media, any connectivity type fiber, satellite, and mobile broadband services like LTE and 5G.” Standardized templates are used to configure different sites, so IT admins don’t have to start from scratch.

To gain end-to-end visibility and the ability to use data to proactively manage digital performance, Nestlé chose ThousandEyes, a cloud-based assurance platform that provides real-time visibility, monitoring, and insights across the internet, cloud, and enterprise networks. With the company’s internet and cloud-first architecture, ThousandEyes provides real-time insights into internet paths, internet service protocol (ISP) performance, and cloud application performance. This significantly accelerates troubleshooting and mitigates network issues that threaten connectivity and quality of service. Case in point: When the PEACE subsea cable was cut in East Africa in March 2025—impacting traffic between Egypt and Singapore many businesses were offline for weeks, while Nestlé was operational in under one day.

Insights and predictive analytics from ThousandEyes extend to application traffic at individual Nestlé offices to ensure consistent experiences for tools like Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce. In one isolated region, ThousandEyes monitored cross-border network performance and identified and helped correct bottlenecks on paths that adhered to very strict regional compliance regulations.

Connected smart factories and AI

High-speed, reliable connectivity has also benefited Nestlé’s smart factories, with their connected manufacturing solutions spanning machinery, sensors, Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and operational technology (OT). Real-time monitoring of factory and warehouse environments, advanced analytics, and proactive alerts have minimized production downtime, and dashboards provide visibility into metrics like temperature, humidity, and equipment health, enabling data-driven decision making.

“At Nestlé, we are not adapting to change, we’re engineering for it,” said Ralf Huebenthal. “AI isn’t just enhancing our operations—it’s reshaping the scale, speed, and complexity of everything we do. It’s also driving more traffic, faster, across our network—from factories to cloud platforms and from consumers to critical applications. It’s creating new challenges for how we move, manage, and protect data at scale, across every plant, every market, every brand.”

Andrea Castano recalled first hearing about Cisco Multi-Region Fabric SD-WAN at Cisco Live two years ago. “Cisco was able to understand our pain and offer a solution. Today we have the agility, resiliency, and readiness we need to meet networking demands as a major global brand that is quickly evolving in scale and complexity.”