Oldcastle APG Accelerates M&A with Palo Alto Networks

SUMMARY

Oldcastle APG, a CRH Company supplies critical infrastructure and building materials across North America, operating roughly 300 manufacturing facilities in the United States. To support corporate growth driven by mergers and acquisitions (M&A), the company requires digital agility, secure branches, and constant operational uptime. Before it partnered with Palo Alto Networks, its legacy solution had introduced severe network risks, culminating in a multi-day outage that halted plant operations. To address these vulnerabilities, Oldcastle deployed a unified security platform from Palo Alto Networks^® to secure its distributed edge, protect plant floor devices, and drastically accelerate site onboarding.

RESULTS

<2 days

to secure a new facility, down from weeks

4 dashboards

consolidated into a single pane of glass

60 facilities

protected by Next-Generation Firewalls

CHALLENGES

A growing footprint outpaces its infrastructure.

Oldcastle faced systemic technical, operational, and visibility limitations across its distributed footprint:

Technical limitations caused a severe multi-day network outage when the previous vendor’s managed SD-WAN failed at the circuit level, stopping critical plant operations.
Scalability constraints delayed corporate expansion, with vendor-controlled onboarding forcing the team to wait weeks or months to secure and connect new M&A sites.
Security gaps emerged on the factory floor, where smart manufacturing systems and legacy operational technology couldn’t run traditional endpoint security agents.
Operational bottlenecks drained IT productivity, as engineers navigated four separate management dashboards to troubleshoot network and security events.
Connectivity degradation impacted remote corporate staff and traveling executives, creating heavy help-desk ticket backlogs due to dropped VPN connections.

“Prisma SASE has been a true game-changer. We no longer have to troubleshoot VPN connectivity or have our roaming users enter passwords. And it’s had the greatest impact on M&A, substantially increasing our ability to onboard sites very quickly.”

— Dexter Cole

Director of OT Integration Engineering,
Oldcastle APG

SOLUTIONS

Accelerating growth and protecting business continuity with Prisma SASE

Oldcastle deployed Prisma SASE to unify its networking and security infrastructure. The team replaced its legacy infrastructure with Prisma SD-WAN, gaining Layer 7 application-based routing to dynamically prioritize critical corporate applications, such as the company's ERP system, over non-essential traffic. To protect remote workers and traveling executives, the organization rolled out Prisma Access. User connections are now automatically secured at home, in hotels, or at airports, eliminating manual VPN authentication barriers and performance drops. This complete platform approach provides the scalable network backbone necessary to accelerate M&A integrations, reducing branch provisioning times from weeks to fewer than two days via automated Zero Touch Provisioning.
Protecting the factory floor with OT Device Security

Securing specialized endpoints on the factory floor is essential to prevent production halts, which is why Oldcastle is adopting OT Device Security to resolve historical visibility gaps across its plants. As Director of OT Integration Engineering Dexter Cole notes, “A breach could halt an entire production line, so securing those devices is essential for us to maintain operations and prevent massive financial loss.” Because the company’s legacy operational technology systems can’t host traditional security agents, the platform will automatically discover, classify, and monitor every connected asset instead. This new level of visibility will protect smart automated systems and forklift-labeling devices without interfering with real-time manufacturing lines. Ultimately, engineers will use the telemetry to create granular access control rules via Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls, separating plant systems from standard IT environments.
Unifying visibility through Strata Cloud Manager and Autonomous Digital Experience Manager

Oldcastle adopted Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) to combine its tools into a single dashboard, replacing four disconnected management portals with a shared view for both network and security teams. This integration allows those teams to collaborate in real time, spot anomalies quickly, and shift away from daily firefighting toward proactive engineering projects. Natively integrated with Prisma SASE, Autonomous Digital Experience Manager (ADEM) provides deep, proactive visibility that lets the IT team isolate local Wi-Fi, ISP, and application issues, resolving connection flaws before users experience downtime. This proactive troubleshooting has significantly reduced both the volume of help desk calls and the mean time to repair, ensuring employees spend less time fighting their technology and more time staying productively connected.

“ADEM gives our IT team deep visibility into end-user experience, allowing us to pinpoint exactly where connection is failing before a user even has to call the help desk. This proactive troubleshooting has helped us significantly reduce the meantime to repair issues for calls that are coming into our service desk.”

— Dexter Cole

Director of OT Integration Engineering,
Oldcastle APG

A strategic foundation for secure innovation.

Oldcastle views Palo Alto Networks as a long-term strategic partner in scaling its business safely. Looking ahead, the company plans to expand its deployment of Next-Generation Firewalls while evaluating emerging capabilities for securing AI workflows. As it evolves its security posture, it will continue to consolidate disparate security tools into a single platform to improve operational speed, shift IT culture toward innovation, and safely accelerate corporate growth.