KLM Engineering

KLM Engineering addresses business continuity concerns and company breakaway

Facing the prospect of a Civil Aviation Authority audit to assess their ability to manage disaster recovery, and realising they needed a more resilient network to better manage business continuity and reduce risk, KLM Engineering approached LAN3 for help

Civil Aviation Authority Audit Passed

375 Staff

Company Network Breakaway

How to Ensure a Reliable Network When Every Hour Not on the Shop Floor Costs Money.

The company’s Safety and Compliance Department had conducted its own audit of KLM Engineering’s network infrastructure and raised concerns that there was little provision for network redundancy or outage, both of which posed a serious threat to business continuity and the maintenance of service.

Mark Walker, IT Manager at KLM Engineering, said: “In addition to the Civil Aviation Authority audit, KLM Engineering’s network connection had always been provided from a parent company’s head office in Amsterdam. The result was a heavily restricted 2mb internet connection that was restricting work on both the shop floor and the back office.”

With close to 400 employees spread across the shop floor and back office, KLM Engineering believed the only way to address this problem was to separate themselves from the head office’s connection and upgrade their own network.

LAN3 proposed Extreme Networks core switches, and after comparing them to an equivalent Hewlett Packard product, KLM Engineering elected for the greater flexibility they felt the Extreme Networks switches offered. And having worked with Extreme Networks for their edge switching, this was a solution KLM Engineering believed in.

How LAN3's Solution Helped

With LAN3’s solution in place the difference was immediate. The speed and reliability of the network drastically improved, and with a 40GB backbone, the speed of data transfer across the network is very quick when replicating servers and data stores between computer rooms.

Mark Walker added: “The best part of the solution LAN3 proposed is that it is largely maintenance and administration free. We’ve not had to do anything, and as we’re not a massive team this is very important. It allows us to focus on more strategic projects rather than worrying about network administration.”

In August 2015 KLM Engineering were audited internally, and their network was found to be disaster recovery compliant.

“From start to finish LAN3 were professional, knowledgeable and keen to understand the problems and issues we faced as a business, and help us address them.”“With a new International Aviation Academy ready for take-off in 2017, the first of its kind in the UK, these are exciting times for KLM Engineering, and we need a resilient IT network to support us as we grow.”

Mark Walker IT Manager, KLM Engineering

About KLM

KLM UK Engineering Limited is a leading regional aircraft and narrow body maintenance, repair and operations provider based at Norwich International Airport, and employ 375 staff.