Legacy Infrastructure Challenges at Toyota Material Handling
Toyota Material Handling North America, the industry leader in forklift manufacturing, operates a sprawling 57-acre campus with four interconnected plants and two more under construction. The organization faced significant challenges with aging network infrastructure that had reached end-of-support and end-of-sale status, resulting in frequent outages, firmware vulnerabilities, and an inability to maintain support contracts. The network architecture team, led by Christopher Garcia and security architect Michael Nichols, identified critical gaps in east-west traffic visibility and the need for role-based access controls across their complex manufacturing environment.
Comprehensive Fortinet Deployment and Integration
Over an 18-month implementation period utilizing Fortinet professional services, Toyota Material Handling deployed a comprehensive security stack including edge FortiGates with IBGP configuration across five zones (plant, enterprise, data center, wireless, and DMZ), FortiManager for centralized management, FortiNAC for wireless access control across 14 VLANs, FortiEDR for endpoint protection, and FortiDeceptor for OT environment visibility. The team specifically chose FortiEDR for its ability to manage endpoints both on-network and off-network, addressing the remote workforce challenges that emerged post-COVID. FortiDeceptor proved particularly valuable for the sensitive OT environment where traditional agent-based security products cannot be deployed.
