Case Study: Sensonic achieves always-on, secure global cloud connectivity for track condition monitoring with Barracuda Networks

Enabling Sensonic to provide track condition monitoring and advanced infrastructure protection for the railway industry

Sensonic GmbH builds a cloud-based “vibrational” digital twin for entire railway networks using fiber-optic sensing and ML to monitor track condition, intrusions, and cable theft without closures or manual inspections. Their Edge Devices (each covering ~80 km) prefilter large sensor datasets and must maintain reliable, secure, always-on connectivity to the public cloud worldwide while protecting tenant analytics from internet threats — a demanding IIoT connectivity and security challenge.

Barracuda deployed a three-part solution — Secure Connector embedded in each Edge Device, CloudGen Firewall in the public cloud, and centralized management via Firewall Control Center with Infrastructure-as-Code templates — providing encrypted TINA-VPN connectivity, zero-touch provisioning, automatic cloud failover, and next-gen firewall protection. The result is fast, global, low-effort rollout and continuous, secure cloud access for Sensonic’s ML analytics, enabling scalable deployments, protected cloud infrastructure, and the successful market delivery of their track-monitoring service.

Sensonic

Johannes Nöbauer

Chief Information Officer