Multinational Food and Beverage Manufacturer

Food and beverage manufacturers operate under strict regulatory requirements for food safety, traceability, and uptime — making reliable IT/OT infrastructure a compliance necessity, not just an operational preference. This multinational CPG manufacturer faced a compounding problem across its 44 North American production sites: legacy network infrastructure that was architecturally incompatible with modern cloud platforms, inconsistent cybersecurity practices across facilities, and no standardized patch management. The fragmented environment blocked adoption of data analytics and AI-driven monitoring tools. Worse, the company lacked the internal IT staffing to manage security at scale, leaving OT systems exposed and incident response slow — a liability in an industry where a single compromised site can trigger costly production halts or regulatory scrutiny.

Rockwell Automation designed and deployed a cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution standardized across all 44 North American sites. The engagement covered the full IT/OT security stack: centralized OT patch management, antivirus deployment, network segmentation to isolate plant-floor systems from corporate IT, TechConnect technical support agreements, and 24/7 managed help desk access. Predictive ML models were integrated into the monitoring layer to detect anomalous network behavior and flag potential security incidents before they escalated — shifting the posture from reactive break-fix to proactive threat management. By consolidating infrastructure under a managed services model, the manufacturer eliminated the dependency on scarce specialized IT staff at individual sites while gaining consistent security enforcement and the network foundation required to support future AI and analytics workloads.

The modernization program delivered measurable improvements in response speed and risk posture across all 44 sites:

• 90% reduction in network response time — average incident SLA dropped from 10 minutes to 3.5 minutes
• Cyber risk substantially reduced through consistent patch cadence, antivirus coverage, and network segmentation applied uniformly across facilities
• Unplanned downtime decreased as proactive monitoring replaced reactive troubleshooting
• Staffing gap addressed — managed services model removed reliance on hard-to-hire OT security specialists at each location

Beyond the metrics, the standardized infrastructure created the data pipeline and network stability needed to pursue broader AI and analytics initiatives across the manufacturing network.

• Legacy IT/OT incompatibility is a blocker for AI adoption — infrastructure modernization must precede analytics and ML initiatives, not follow them.
• A managed IaaS model converts large capital infrastructure projects into predictable operational expenditures, making enterprise-scale rollouts financially viable.
• Network segmentation between OT and IT environments is a prerequisite for safe cloud connectivity in food manufacturing, where a breach can have food safety consequences.
• Centralizing patch management and antivirus across all sites eliminates the security inconsistencies that make multi-site manufacturers disproportionately attractive targets.
• Predictive ML for network monitoring is most effective when layered on a standardized, well-segmented infrastructure — not deployed on top of fragmented legacy systems.