RaceTrac was experiencing an ongoing problem. Connectivity at its stores had become unreliable, causing network outages several times a week. During those periods, payments and other transactions requiring network access couldn’t be completed, impacting customer service and costing the business revenue. When its existing networking solution came to end of life, an opportunity opened for RaceTrac to modernize. The key was to move quickly, before the legacy hardware reached its expiration date while addressing these requirements:
- Rapid deployment of SD-WAN to 800 retail locations with minimum expertise required for technicians.
- A highly available and resilient network to make outages the exception vs. the norm.
- Reduce trouble tickets to its Service Desk, enabling the team to focus on strategic priorities.
- Consistent network performance and security across all stores, applying segmentation, unifying policies, and enforcing Zero Trust.
- Visibility across network, security and user experience to strengthen RaceTrac’s digital transformation.
“Strata Cloud Manager has given us the ability to automate many NOC operations, such as firmware upgrades, policy pushes and script network upgrades. This has saved us many hours of manual labor, freeing us up to look at our enterprise in a more holistic approach.”
Joash Jaggernauth
Jaggernauth, Lead Network Engineer, RaceTrac
When the search began for an alternative connectivity solution, RaceTrac knew it needed to move quickly. It had less than 12 months to evaluate, test and deploy the new solution to hundreds of retail locations.
The company evaluated several vendors, but Palo Alto Networks stood out— especially for the simplicity of Prisma SD-WAN, which would allow for rapid rollout and deliver a resilient architecture, promising greater network reliability.
Another advantage was the platform nature of the solution, which would integrate well with other Palo Alto Networks products already in use at RaceTrac: Cortex XDR by the Security team and Next-Generation Firewalls by the Infrastructure organization. Joash Jaggernauth, Lead Network Engineer, notes, “With Palo Alto Networks, we’d have a single pane of glass across all the divisions.”
For accelerated deployment, RaceTrac engaged a managed services provider to scale the rollout of Prisma SD-WAN to multiple locations. The initial rollout was just five stores to help teams learn the process and build a scalable deployment plan. From there, the pace increased to 100–200 stores per week. In all, it took RaceTrac only three months to modernize all of its 800 retail locations across 13 states. Each store took only three hours to deploy fully.
Since making the change to Palo Alto Networks, RaceTrac minimized weekly outages at stores, enjoying high-performing and resilient connectivity at all storefronts. The transformation dramatically lowered trouble tickets for RaceTrac’s store networking team, which saw a 99% reduction year-over-year.
After deploying Prisma SD-WAN, RaceTrac also saw value in Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) and Prisma Access. With SCM’s controlled templatized firewall configurations across multiple facets of the enterprise, SCM has provided great value to RaceTrac. A singular place to observe mobile VPN users, cloud, data center and branch resources has unified the company’s IT department. Additionally, the power of SASE could drive not just best-in-class network performance but security as well. With Prisma SASE, RaceTrac is better able to secure communications from each store. Jaggernauth explains, “Each store was using VPN tunnels to transact payments. But we had no visibility into which branches had active VPN connections. That limited how we could manage the stores.”
When RaceTrac rolls out Prisma Access in 2025, it will enable adoption of new security strategies, including enforcement of Zero Trust Network Access, that hadn’t been possible with its legacy infrastructure. Addition of Cloud-Delivered Security Services—Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced DNS Security, Advanced URL Filtering and Advanced WildFire—will add further protection for its stores and, ultimately, RaceTrac’s customers.
The platform approach provides another powerful advantage for RaceTrac. Its existing Cortex Data Lake, managed by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, will be able to ingest logs from Prisma SASE to provide more comprehensive and even deeper visibility into its environment, further strengthening the security posture company-wide.
“With Palo Alto Networks, we’re future-proofing our business. The solutions we have adopted are an embellishment of our current investments. Prisma SD-WAN helped unify all of that to get us to a single pane of glass across all our divisions.”
Joash Jaggernauth
Lead Network Engineer RaceTrac
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