Case Study: Grupo Colón Gerena achieves high-availability, secure connectivity for 118 restaurants with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN

Major Puerto Rican Food Service Company Connects 118 Restaurants to a HighAvailability Secure Network

Grupo Colón Gerena is a major Puerto Rican restaurant group operating 118 restaurants (plus distribution and corporate sites) across the island. Rapid expansion and the infrastructure damage from Hurricane María exposed critical connectivity and security gaps: MPLS outages disrupted payments, reporting, and time tracking, and temporary cellular hotspots could not support all services or centralized management.

Working with Fortinet and partner Kryonyx, the company deployed a Fortinet Secure SD-WAN architecture—FortiGate at each site plus FortiAP, FortiSwitch and FortiManager for centralized control—creating a highly available, segmented network across 120 locations. The rollout replaced costly MPLS with broadband (saving about $180,000 annually with an ~18‑month ROI), cut management/configuration time by ~70%, improved security and uptime, and enabled new services like self‑service kiosks.

Grupo Colon Gerena

Ramon Vazquez

IT Director