Calgon Carbon Builds a Robust, Future-Ready Global Network

There’s nothing more important to life than clean air and water, and these precious resources are increasingly at risk.

Calgon Carbon is on a mission to mitigate those risks and make the world a cleaner and healthier place. The company works with water utilities, brand name manufacturers, large industrial companies and the U.S. government to remediate and purify air emissions and contaminated water systems, ensuring millions of people worldwide have safe water to drink and clean air to breathe.

“Whether it’s a large water utility serving thousands of citizens or supplying a fish tank filtration media that you can buy from Amazon, our solutions make a positive impact in over 700 applications,” says Calgon Carbon’s Executive Director of Information Technology, Tim Drook.

Cleaning up the world’s air and water requires a lot of coordination, and Calgon Carbon’s IT department manages the IT infrastructure, applications and security to support the company’s efforts in more than 25 locations throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

“We work to ensure that our end users and customers can collaborate, communicate and work with each other in real time on a dependable and reliable IT platform,” Drook says.

IT plays a massive role in supporting Calgon Carbon’s mission to safeguard public health, and their network is the backbone of their success.

A critical global network experiencing too many outages

But Calgon Carbon’s network wasn’t always so dependable, and the IT backbone wasn’t always as strong as they wanted it to be.

“Before we started working with Lumen, we faced issues with network dependability and experienced a high number of outages,” Drook explains. “We often struggled getting timely support in resolving these issues.”

These issues were poised to increase exponentially due to a business acquisition, which required Calgon Carbon’s IT team to integrate eight new European sites into their global wide area network (WAN). The team took the acquisition as an opportunity to look for a partner that could address some of their network challenges. They decided to put their trust in Lumen, which had an excellent reputation for networking, dependability and customer service.

A stable network with optimal speeds is a necessity for those working out of offices at Calgon Carbon’s multiple production sites, some of which are in remote locations. The company initially engaged Lumen to provide network services at a few of those sites and remote European locations. Lumen delivered, enabling employees to engage closely with customers from locations throughout the world.

“Lumen quickly demonstrated they were a reliable partner that we could depend on,” says Drook. “We immediately noticed that our network outages in our day-to-day operations were much more stable. When we did have issues, the Lumen customer support team was excellent.”

Following that initial success, the team made a strategic decision to consolidate and migrate their entire global WAN network to Lumen Technologies. This move has made life easier for the IT team, who enjoy simplified administration and faster resolution times.

“Now they are our single global carrier, and this has decreased our support efforts and improved our network stability across all of our locations,” Drook shares.

Strengthening security and collaboration

As a trusted strategic partner, Lumen is always finding new ways to bolster Calgon Carbon’s network. They’re laser-focused on staying ahead of cyberthreats and are currently upgrading the company’s older MPLS-based network to a more resilient infrastructure in Lumen® SD-WAN with Versa Networks, which also integrates with their existing Prisma infrastructure.

“Managing security risks requires increased visibility and control over network traffic,” explains Drook. “This will greatly improve our overall security posture by integrating security into our network architecture and providing redundancies at multiple key locations.”

Any downtime due to a security incident has the potential to various stakeholders, such as impeding the ability to communicate and exchange information effectively with customers and suppliers. Moving to Lumen® SD-WAN with Versa Networks will maximize Calgon Carbon’s performance and bandwidth efficiency at the organization’s international locations, leading to even less downtime. With a stable network operating at optimal speeds, the company can communicate and collaborate more easily, whether workers are in the field servicing customers, meeting with municipal leaders or deploying innovative solutions.

A strategic partnership for a cleaner tomorrow

The Lumen management and customer advocate team continues to help Calgon Carbon adopt new technologies, and Tim considers Lumen one of the organization’s “most valued IT partners.” Their relationship continues to grow—both in terms of operations and actively working together to plan for the future.

“Partnering with Lumen Technologies was definitely the right decision for our team,” Drook says.

The success of Calgon Carbon’s efforts depends on strong partnerships and shared goals. Their partnership with Lumen is no different. Together, they’ve created robust, secure and reliable IT foundations to pursue a better, cleaner future.

To hear more about how Lumen customers made their businesses more robust and secure, check out our customer success stories.

Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement.

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