Success Stories
ABL Lawyers and Advisers Choose Resilience VPN/Firewall Solution to Secure Confidential Data
As legal representatives to Australia's wealthiest customers, the Arnold Bloch Leibler team is committed to providing the highest level of security protection for their confidential data. Secure access by authorized parties and reliable uptime is crucial to ABL in running an efficient law firm.
The Situation
Arnold Bloch Leibler was handling a large case involving thousands of shareholders, and numerous banks and financial firms, requiring access to millions of pages of documents and images. ABL needed a secure gateway to protect its enterprise information, and to integrate with its existing operating environment. In order to provide secure access to all concerned parties, ABL decided to surround their document management system for this case within a "DMZ" environment with redundant firewalls. With this design, they were able to deliver all requested documents, without providing unrestricted access to enterprise information. Secure electronic access for document administration would also save the client millions of dollars in printing costs.
The ABL IT team went to work researching all high availability systems running Check Point security software. "We found that most HA solutions were too complex, expensive, and difficult to manage" said David Leong, IT Director for ABL. "Resilience assisted us with our decision by allowing us to pilot their solution for six weeks." ABL committed itself to the Resilience solution even before the pilot period ended.
The Solution: Resilience 4400 Firewall Appliance
"The self configuration and auto failover of the Resilience box in addition to working with just one Check Point license was a major differentiator from the other products. The high availability in standby mode was a key feature for ABL and Resilience provided it," said Leong. "The cutover was simple and it has never stopped protecting ABL since, it is bulletproof! With Resilience, ABL has found a partner who understands the needs of a major legal firm for security, availability and ease of access." "ABL is committed to providing the highest level of security protection for our confidential data. Secure access and reliable uptime are absolutely crucial. The Resilience high availability solution is extremely cost-effective and simple and is a key element of our firewall implementation."
David Leong, IT Director for Arnold Bloch Leibler Law Firm
Alstom Power
ALSTOM Power Generates Cost and Maintenance Savings with Resilience Unstoppable Solutions
Economic development and an increase in per-capita electricity usage continue to drive world wide demand for energy. In fact, experts say that over the next 25 years, new energy generation equipment volume equal to today's entire installed capacity is expected to be installed in developing countries as well as traditional Western markets. One company benefiting from the high demand for energy equipment, systems, and services is ALSTOM Power, the U.S. division of ALSTOM S.A., the global leader in energy infrastructure.
ALSTOM Power provides a wide range of power generation solutions to its customers, which include Independent Power Producers (IPPs), utilities and industrial clients. The solutions include everything from turnkey power plants to all types of turbines, generators, boilers, environmental control products and control systems as well as a full range of services including plant modernization, maintenance and long- term operation. To support ALSTOM's pursuit of high growth market opportunities, the company increasingly relies on the Internet and its network infrastructure to support mission-critical business processes. As a result, security and availability have become crucial business issues. This is why ALSTOM turned to Resilience for a Continuous Availability solution.
"The projects we support represent millions of dollars each. Therefore, our business has a very low tolerance for system failures," explains Richard Mekolichick, IT Network Manager for ALSTOM Power. "Resilience not only drops our downtime exposure to virtually zero, but also delivers a Continuous Availability solution that significantly reduces system administration and our total cost of ownership."
The Need: Reduced Administration and Costs
According to Mekolichick, two factors drove ALSTOM to search for a Continuous Availability solution. First, the IT organization needed to cut the costs and ongoing maintenance associated with its existing cluster-based solution. The company was utilizing a software-based High Availability (HA) system that was costly in terms of licensing and annual maintenance fees. It was also labor-intensive, requiring additional headcount every time the company brought a new firewall online.
"Our existing solution was adequate if we were willing to invest in dedicated support resources," says Mekolichick. "We needed a solution that would enable us to reduce the costs of acquiring and maintaining the system, as well as the ongoing cost of support."
Secondly, attaining the highest level of availability was key. That's because hardware failures on its existing cluster failover system required prolonged problem diagnosis that could expose the company to lost transactional data and unacceptable levels of downtime.
Why Resilience
With its requirements clearly defined, ALSTOM evaluated several solutions. It was during a visit to NetWorld+Interop, an industry trade show, where the company learned about Resilience.
"We were immediately impressed with Resilience," recalls Mekolichick. "Compared to other products, Resilience offered a simple, affordable solution that was easy to deploy and manage. Plus, because it is Solaris-based, it was the ideal solution to support our existing Sun/Solaris environment."
According to Mekolichick, it was actually a code migration project where ALSTOM discovered Resilience's advantage. While ALSTOM was evaluating its server availability options, it was also upgrading and migrating its firewall server code.
Due to the company's requirement of zero downtime, ALSTOM absolutely could not bring down the server to migrate the code. This required a solution that allowed the IT group to upgrade the new code, and then gracefully take the old hardware down without affecting business operations. "Resilience proved itself by allowing us to migrate the code to the new server without a glitch. It was completely transparent to the user community."
Currently, ALSTOM has deployed two Resilience Ultra Continuous Availability servers as internal and external firewalls. Based on Sun UltraSPARC technology and Resilience 's patented Triple Modular Redundant (TMR) architecture, the Resilience Ultra offers unmatched levels of availability and data protection when compared to cluster-based, high availability products. In addition, Resilience Ultra servers run all Solaris applications without modification and can be deployed in less than 30 minutes.
Zero Downtime without the Headaches
As Mekolichick describes it, "Our Resilience systems are significantly more affordable to administer and have been up and running without a glitch since installation." Besides dramatic cost savings, the most substantial benefit realized so far is knowing the company's firewalls are protected from devastating downtime.
"If a firewall goes down, we're dead," says Mekolichick. "And if it stays down, not only does productivity suffer, it can get costly. In fact, most of our projects have penalty delay terms that run as high as $100,000 per day per project." Typically, ALSTOM is challenged with meeting a tight production schedule, according to Mekolichick. A firewall failure in this instance would prevent field engineering from getting information on a particular part. Or it could block access to critical project data that would help engineering solve a problem, such as a power plant outage. "With Resilience servers, we have gained the highest level of availability with the least amount of hardware, complexity, and total cost," says Mekolichick.
Full Steam Ahead
Mekolichick sees Resilience playing a key role in helping ALSTOM support mission-critical business processes-particularly as ALSTOM continues to focus on high growth, high margin opportunities in the energy and transport infrastructure markets.
"ALSTOM is constantly focused on improving its return on capital," concludes Mekolichick. "And with Resilience, we believe we have the most practical solution that will allow us to maximize our ROI as we expand our firewall environment going forward."
International School of Brussels
Check Point and Resilience Give Peace of Mind to IT Staff When School is Out
Introduction
The International School of Brussels (ISB), founded in 1951, is an English-language day school that provides an international education to students from over sixty countries whose ages range from three to eighteen years. ISB is situated on a forty-acre wooded campus about nine kilometers from the center of Brussels, Belgium. ISB's IT network provides services for admissions, class schedules, computer education classes and student records to eight different learning units within the school as well as for school's human resources department, email and other data related housekeeping functions.
The challenge: Who minds the network when school is out?
Being a school, ISB closes for extended holiday breaks. This means the IT staff will not be on site for significant periods of time even though the school's network must continue in operation. As a not-for-profit organization, ISB's IT department must have a solution that makes every cent count.
Check Point + Resilience = the UNSTOPPABLE answer for ISB
When it came time to select a firewall, ISB's IT director Doug Stone turned to - and has stayed with - a Check Point / Resilience firewall solution. "We have been using a Resilience Check Point FW-1 appliance for several years; it has proved to be a very stable platform. Prior to the Resilience appliance we ran FW-1 on a PC with a standard OS. This solution provided no redundancy and required maintenance of the OS. The high availability configuration of the Resilience appliance provides us with completely redundant firewall modules with a hardened OS that is virtually maintenance free. We can concentrate on the routine administration of FW-1. As a school with a small IT team we needed a solution that gives us a very stable Internet connection even when our IT staff was not on-site for one or two weeks at a time during holiday periods. The Resilience appliance has enabled us to achieve this" stated Stone.
According to Kris Gantois, a director of Ascure a Resilience reseller in Ghent "While ISB demonstrates the value Resilience's Integrated High Availability appliances for ISB's special circumstances, the same benefits are essential for any enterprise that wants to cut IT overhead, or, whose network provides services for remote locations that may not have trained IT staff available on a regular basis."
Further information can be obtained for Ascure (put in contact details, or directly from Gordon Grant General manager etc.)
Resilience and the Resilience logo are trademarks of Resilience Corporation. Other referenced products, brands, service marks and trademarks are the property of their respective owners, all rights reserved. © Resilience Corporation, 2005.
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