Sea Chefs Navigates a Network Upgrade with Riedel

Cruise ships are floating cities that cater to guests looking to get away from it all. Guests enjoy onboard shopping, fine dining, nightlife, and entertainment while staff and crew handle everything behind the scenes, from booking spa appointments to managing security.

All of these activities rely heavily on IT infrastructure, and when you’re miles away from land, the reliability of this infrastructure is non-negotiable.

Ahoy to adventure

Creating the perfect seafaring experience requires massive human and material resources, and cruise ship operators work with many partners to bring everything together seamlessly.

sea chefs is one such partner. We are one of the world's leading partners of shipping companies and tour operators in the cruise industry. We create smooth processes for everything from conception and planning to logistics and implementation to crew management and daily operations—everything cruise companies need to make travellers’ dreams come true.

Serving a global industry requires an international presence. Sea Chefs has six offices in Europe: two in Germany, two in Switzerland, and another in Cyprus and Malta. We share enterprise applications and sensitive data between these locations, including payroll information and legal documents.

Fighting against the current

In the past, sea chefs used expensive VPN connections over the public internet. Our network was error-prone, suffered frequent failures, and experienced high latency, especially the main route connecting Cyprus to the rest of Europe. There were no centralized resources, so each location had an onsite server farm that was costly to operate and maintain. Technicians had to travel between offices every time there was an issue, which added to our support costs and increased the likelihood of downtime.

We had a long wishlist for a new solution:

• A more stable, reliable network
• Improved scalability for storage and compute
• A smaller hardware footprint at our offices
• Easier server management
• A partner who could configure and operate our international network so we could focus on our customers

Meeting all of these needs required the team to shift their perspective and look toward a new era—and a new partnership with Riedel Networks.

Charting a new course with a faster, more efficient network

We started by ditching our bare metal hardware for virtual servers hosted on a centralized Microsoft Azure cloud. Next, we replaced our VPN setup with a dedicated MPLS network architected and managed by Riedel Networks.

Our MPLS network runs on private infrastructure. It features advanced packet forwarding that reduces latency and improves speed. It prioritizes time-sensitive traffic, reroutes signals in the event of link failures, and consolidates multiple types of traffic to better route traffic. Best of all, it’s entirely operated and managed by Riedel, eliminating the tedious work of maintaining and securing our network.

Riedel also provides backup infrastructure that fails over in milliseconds if our primary network experiences an outage—which has happened only a few of times in three years (and are primarily Azure-related). The process is entirely transparent to our internal IT team and enables the rest of our colleagues to continue receiving emails and using enterprise applications without interruption. Network issues that once took our operations offline have no impact on our activities.

Because it’s separated from the public internet, our MPLS is also protected from outages resulting from public infrastructure failures. A couple of years ago, a Hamburg construction crew accidentally struck a fiber optic cable, disrupting connectivity to parts of the city. Had we still been using VPN connections, our office would have been paralyzed. Instead, it was business as usual.

Riding the waves of dramatic improvements

Riedel Networks’ MPLS service has dramatically increased our access speed, seamlessly connecting our European offices to our central cloud-based data center on Microsoft Azure. Remote files and applications run as if they were local, with virtually no lag. Our communication with Cyprus specifically is also faster—despite the distance and reliance on an undersea cable—because we no longer struggle with the challenges of a VPN network.

We have complete confidence in Riedel Networks, not just as a service provider but as our technology partner. For example, when we take our office routers offline to update firmware or replace a faulty cable, we let them know. If we accidentally unplug a device, they’ll call to ensure we’re not experiencing an actual outage, advising us of an issue we might have overlooked. It’s reassuring to know they’ll step in if they spot a problem.

Outsourcing network management to Riedel also takes the pressure off our IT teams. We can serve our crewing team, procurement department, and other internal services instead of spending time monitoring, configuring, and optimizing our network.

Smooth sailing ahead

The combination of Riedel Networks MPLS technology and cloud-based servers on Microsoft Azure has helped Sea Chefs streamline and optimize our IT infrastructure. We are using fast private connections that shield us from exposure to public internet outages, and we are no longer paying exorbitant VPN license fees. Our centralized virtual servers are scalable, upgradable, and instantly available to all our employees across Europe.

We are more efficient, and our increased capabilities enable us to help our cruise partners deliver exceptional experiences.