A deep inspection firewall solution to secure an enterprise network at the Sunninghill headquarters of engineering design, procurement and construction management service provider Engineering and Projects Company (EPC, formerly Grinaker-LTA Process Engineering), has been designed and installed by the JSE-listed IT-based business enabling solutions provider, Square One Solutions Group.
Square One, an Elite Partner of Juniper Networks, recommended Juniper's Netscreen 208 firewall to secure access between a new router connecting EPC to its major mining customer Anglo Platinum, and a database management zone (DMZ) hosting Lotus Notes application servers. In addition, another existing router had to be connected to the firewall and a second DMZ needed to be secured, requiring a total of six interfaces.
Luca Ambrosi, Square One's project manager for contract, said the Netscreen 208 firewall was selected as the core of the solution because of its ability to easily integrate and most reliably secure many different network environments.
"It offered an excellent mix of performance, interfaces and flexibility for the EPC application with eight auto-sensing 10/100 Base-T Ethernet ports and the capability to perform firewall functions at wire speeds of typically 550Mbps. Even highly intense encryption applications are executed at speeds greater than 200Mbps."
Ambrosi said that pervasive application-level protection is most critical for the security of enterprise networks. "The modern computing environment has become widely distributed and this leaves network perimeters vulnerable because most firewalls cannot protect against application level attacks."
He added that an exception is the Netscreen deep inspection firewall, which protects the application-layer protocols typically used in the smaller nodes of the network such as remote, branch and regional offices. "It was therefore the ideal solution for EPC's online data exchange with Anglo Platinum. The new network extension now supports the wide range of services provided to the mineral processing and refining operations in a highly secure manner."
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