Value Stories- FIGHTING FIRES

FIGHTING FIRES

SATHISH KUMAR, SALES DIRECTOR, TEKSALAH, DESCRIBES, HOW THE SYSTEMS INTEGRATOR SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED THE NUMBER OF SECURITY BREACHES BEING RECORDED BY A LEADING HEALTHCARE COMPANY THROUGH IMPLEMENTING A COST-EFFECTIVE, ENTERPRISE-CLASS FIREWALL SOLUTION.

A leader in healthcare specialty markets was facing several issues with accessing its critical infrastructure. The company,headquartered in Dubai, operates in 13 countries across the MENA region from 22 offices. More than 1500 members of staff were attempting to access their business critical applications via the AWS Cloud, and faced considerable difficulties including downtime, latency and security breaches.

The company turned to Teksalah, the UAE-based systems integrator, to seek out a cost effective, enterprise-class solution. Ensuring a solid enterprise security architecture was also of paramount importance, considering the company had faced data breaches via its existing firewall that attacked its back-ups.

Working closely with Fortinet and Redington, Teksalah presented a PoC to the customer that demonstrated the comprehensive benefits of replacing their existing security provider with Fortinet’s virtual firewall.

“We had plenty of satisfied customers that had adopted the Fortinet FortiGate Virtual Firewall in AWS Cloud, so we knew that this was enterprise-class technology at a fair price point,” explained Sathish Kumar, Sales Director, Teksalah. “It offers performance that is better than the application trend, and provides multi-layer protection.”

The team conducted a full risk and gap analysis before embarking on the project kick-off, in addition to an audit of the critical business applications that should be prioritized for the migration. This proved to be an invaluable exercise as it identified some core applications that hadn’t been listed in the original scope, which could have been a roadblock in the project delivery.

“We call this process an X-Ray, as it gives you complete visibility on what’s going on inside the architecture,” explained Kumar.

“Once we identified the priorities, we were able to successfully migrate these over to the new solution without enduring downtime or issues with user experience.”

Though the team was successful in completing the deployment ahead of schedule, there were some challenges faced along the way. “The biggest challenge for us was the short cut-over time, i.e. the time allocated for potential downtime during the implementation. This was due to the differing time zones needing 24/7 access to applications, which meant we were only given between 30 minutes and 1 hour to make any changes to the security appliance.

To mitigate any potential mishaps, we conducted multiple test runs in our labs to ensure that the real ones went well,” explained Kumar.

Since the implementation, the customer has benefitted from a significant drop in the number of security breaches reported. “Previously, the customer was seeing reports of hundreds of incidents every month - this is now down to single digits,” said Kumar. In addition, the customer has seen improved application performance and availability, alongside greater visibility on traffic security.

The Teksalah team is now continuing their work with the customer on further deployments in the future. “In the next stage of our journey, we will work to standardize their network access control with Fortinet,” said Kumar.

“We look forward to continuing our unique approach on how we advise transformation recommendations.”