Fast-food chain Dürümle wrap up cybersecurity issues with Prisma SD-WAN

Demand for Dürümle’s delicious wrap foods is growing fast – and fast, reliable connectivity is needed at every outlet to ensure customer orders are processed quickly for a rewarding service experience. However, Dürümle’s reliance on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) led to complexity, excessive costs, and a lack of scalability.

Established in 2017 and owned by Mediterra, Turkey’s leading private equity team, Dürümle are differentiated by their innovative vision, product range, and concept. With investment from Capital in 2020, the organisation’s portfolio of fast-food outlets – mainly located in shopping malls – is growing rapidly, with 90 restaurants in 19 cities set to rise to 300 restaurants by 2027.

Operating in an increasingly hybrid world, Dürümle realised they needed to be more agile and customer-centric. Part of the challenge was to modernise branch connectivity. “The branch of the future requires an elastic network, Zero Trust security, and automated operations,” explains Onur Koroglu, IT Director at Dürümle. Their existing MPLS network was struggling to keep pace with connectivity demands arising from point-of-sale (POS) systems, inventory management, and the need to enhance the in-store customer experience – as well as a surge in online ordering and delivery requests.

During peak hours, the demand for network bandwidth often meant connectivity was slow –or, in extreme circumstances, lost altogether. As a result, orders might be delayed or restaurants might be unable to serve at all – leading to lost revenue and frustrated customers.

With such a heavy web presence and the huge amount of POS transactions and stored customer information, the Dürümle retail network was also vulnerable to security risks and breaches.

MPLS network costs were high too – because of the internet service provider (ISP) charges and the MPLS connections having to be configured in unmanaged routers.

Visibility was yet another problem. If a restaurant notified headquarters of a performance or availability problem, the IT team had minimal insight into the root cause of the issue. As a result, rectification became slow, difficult, and expensive.

The requirements for the next-generation SD-WAN platform included:

• Ensuring Dürümle customers receive a consistently rewarding service experience.
• Improving security and performance.
• Reducing network connectivity trouble tickets.
• Minimising WAN connectivity and management costs.

Dürümle deployed Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN in their branches to simplify and streamline WAN management. This innovative solution integrates Next-Generation firewall, advanced routing, and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) into a unified platform. It gives Dürümle a foundation for a Zero Trust Network, converging retail security and networking with complete visibility and control.

The applications supported by Prisma SD-WAN are large and varied, ranging from POS systems, inventory management, and finance applications to in-store CCTV cameras and the Internet Protocol phone system. “Enhanced security, advanced routing, and centralised management enable us to secure the highly distributed WAN network, end-to-end,” says Mr Koroglu.

Prisma SD-WAN is configured to minimise the use of metred backup links and leverage the use of LTE links. This ensures flexibility and agility at a lower cost by sending data over metred links for business continuity only when the primary connection is unavailable.

Prisma SD-WAN was successfully deployed across all 90 branches in only 45 days, by Exclusive Networks, the leading Turkish technology consultancy and Professional Services organisation.

Dürümle’s SD-WAN environment delivers an exceptional end-user experience with simplified operations and improved security outcomes. The benefits include:

• Faster, more satisfying service experiences: Following the Prisma SD-WAN go-live, Dürümle have experienced a 50% increase in performance and availability. This means customers are served 50% faster and with less queuing – crucial to a highly competitive fast-food delivery service. Mr Koroglu explains, “Prisma SD-WAN gives us incredible application availability based on real-time application performance SLAs and visibility. We can achieve a huge improvement in performance while eliminating the challenges with packet- based networks.”
• Simplified retail operations: Prisma SD-WAN has significantly reduced Dürümle’s trouble tickets by simplifying tedious network functions while helping expedite SASE migrations.
• Improved security outcomes: Prisma SD-WAN has natively applied best-in-class security to Dürümle branches, eliminating breaches.
• Scaled restaurant operations: Dürümle can continue to extend their restaurant business across Turkey, confident that their network is simple, secure, and rewarding.
• Reduced costs: Dürümle can continue to manage their fast-expanding branch network with their existing IT team of just three people – additional headcount is not required. The cost of operating the SD-WAN environment is also considerably less expensive than the cost incurred using MPLS.