Automating Zero Trust connectivity into every cloud deployment, without VPNs or firewall exceptions
1st Zero Trust adopter in the label and packaging printing industry
0 Firewall ports opened for customer connectivity
Full CI/CD automation of Zero Trust deployment via Ansible and Jenkins
Day 1 Zero Trust protection for every new customer, no setup delay
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Migrating its MIS software from a private data center to public clouds meant relying on traditional VPNs, which slowed deployments and complicated network management as CERM scaled.
CERM embedded NetFoundry’s Zero Trust networking into its edge environment and automated it directly into its Ansible and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.
CERM became the first company in the label and packaging printing industry to fully adopt Zero Trust architecture, giving customers secure access with nothing to configure.
CERM builds management information system (MIS) software for the label and packaging printing industry, giving converters a single platform to manage production planning, scheduling, and the partner integrations that keep a print shop’s operations running as one connected workflow. The software is built specifically for the industry it serves, and CERM has spent decades refining it alongside packaging converters rather than adapting a generic platform to fit.
That specialization extended to how CERM wanted to run its own infrastructure. As the company moved its MIS platform from a private data center into public clouds, it needed the same precision and reliability in its network architecture that its software delivers to customers on the production floor, and traditional VPNs weren’t going to get it there.
“NetFoundry enabled us to move to Infrastructure-as-Code automation, including customer connectivity. As we roll this out to our customers, we are changing the game for MIS printing and labeling to deliver unmatched innovation to our clients, without asking them to open firewall ports or manage S2S VPNs.”
Nico Delaere, IT Manager, CERM
Moving CERM’s MIS platform out of a private data center and into public clouds meant rethinking how every deployment connected back to the rest of the business. Traditional VPNs were the default option, but they came with the same limitations CERM has spent years helping its own customers engineer around: manual configuration, fragile point-to-point tunnels, and a setup process that had to be repeated and maintained for every new environment. None of that scaled cleanly across a globally distributed, cloud-native footprint.
The friction didn’t stop at CERM’s own infrastructure. Delivering MIS capabilities to customers meant asking their IT teams to open inbound firewall ports or stand up and maintain site-to-site VPNs, requests that slow down onboarding and put CERM in the position of adding risk to a customer’s network just to deliver its software. As CERM looked to scale its cloud deployments and roll out new connectivity to its customer base, that model had to change.
CERM embedded NetFoundry’s Zero Trust networking into its edge environment and adopted NetFoundry‘s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform to handle connectivity between its infrastructure and its customers. Rather than treating network security as a separate step to configure after deployment, CERM automated it directly into its production pipeline using Ansible and Jenkins, so every new environment came online with secure, cloud-native connectivity already in place.
Because the integration between CERM’s platform and NetFoundry is API-driven, new deployments and customer connections are provisioned automatically as part of CERM’s existing CI/CD workflow. There’s no manual VPN configuration to schedule and no separate security setup that has to happen before a customer can go live, which is what let CERM start treating Zero Trust connectivity as a standard part of how it ships software rather than a custom step for each account.
“NetFoundry Cloud has helped us shift our customer connectivity model from something that had to be manually provisioned, account by account, to something that just happens as part of how we deploy.”
Nico Delaere, IT Manager, CERM
By fully embracing Zero Trust architecture, CERM became the first company in the label and packaging printing industry to do so, and that distinction now gives its customers a real competitive edge: they can run digitized, connected production environments without taking on the security tradeoffs that usually come with that shift.
Because Zero Trust connectivity is automated into CERM’s deployment pipeline, new customers benefit from it immediately. There’s no waiting period and no lengthy setup process bolted onto onboarding; the protection is simply part of how the platform arrive
Through NetFoundry’s secure overlay, CERM delivers a private network to its customers over the public internet that outside actors can’t see or reach. Access is governed by identity rather than network location, so only authenticated endpoints with unique, un-copyable certificates can connect to authorized services. Nothing is exposed for an attacker to find in the first place.
NetFoundry helps software companies replace VPN complexity with identity-based Zero Trust networking that deploys as code, automatically, and scales with every new customer, without asking anyone to open a firewall port.
NetFoundry is a leader in Secure Workload Connectivity, founded by the inventors and maintainers of OpenZiti, the world’s most widely used open-source Zero Trust platform. For software companies like CERM building connectivity directly into their own products, NetFoundry replaces the VPNs, firewall exceptions, and manual provisioning that traditionally slow down customer onboarding, with identity-based Zero Trust connectivity that can be automated directly into CI/CD pipelines and deployed as code. NetFoundry secures billions of sessions for critical infrastructure on three continents and supports Fortune 10 companies across regulated industries including healthcare, financial services, and energy.
