City of Boroondara Reduces Teleworking Support Costs with Fortinet Network Security Solution

<p>Fortinet® - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced that the City of Boroondara has successfully implemented a FortiGate® UTM solution to reduce teleworking support costs, and improve security measures for access to both information and applications.</p>
<p>The City of Boroondara is a local government body in the Australian state of Victoria. Located five kilometers east of the Melbourne Central Business District, the council administers sixty square kilometers of suburban Melbourne, providing services to a population of approximately 155,000 people and 13,000 businesses. Directly employing approximately 1,000 employees, City of Boroondara runs its IT operations from a data centre in the Camberwell office.</p>
<p>Michael Hughes, team leader of technical services for City of Boroondara commented, “Our IT team needs to support a number of small offices and people that regularly work from home. We were spending a significant amount of time troubleshooting problems for our teleworkers, and these problems often led to time consuming site visits. To reduce our support costs for teleworkers, we decided that we needed a smarter way of securing their access to our systems.”</p>
<p>To increase security and improve service reliability, City of Boroondara decided to implement a Fortinet network security solution for its teleworkers and small offices. A FortiGate-300A solution was installed at the Camberwell data centre in June 2008, with cost effective FortiWifi™-50B appliances deployed at each small office and at the homes of teleworkers. The solution was designed and installed by O2 Networks, a Gold certified FortiPartner. The project was delivered with a strong focus on minimising the impact to the council’s operations. Technical training was carried out by O2 Networks, enabling the Council IT team to become self sufficient, and progressively deploy and manage new sites.</p>
<p>Hughes continued, “It is extremely important for us to provide safe, secure access to information, while keeping our support and ongoing overheads to a minimum. We found that Fortinet’s UTM solution allowed us to seamlessly deploy secure IPSec VPN tunnels, and combine them with Website content filtering and anti-spam functionality. This has allowed us to dramatically simplify the login experience for our remote users, while allowing us to improve security measures. In the past, our help desk team spent eight hours per week troubleshooting teleworker and remote site problems. Our new Fortinet solution has reduced that time to less than one hour per week, by eliminating our most common teleworking problems.”</p>
<p>The entire unified threat management solution is centrally managed, with standardised settings being used for each FortiWifi-50B appliance. Each teleworker is provided with a preconfigured FortiWifi-50B appliance, which is simply connected to their existing home broadband Internet service. Each FortiWifi-50B appliance provides both protected Ethernet ports, and a secure wireless LAN, and is linked via an encrypted IPSec VPN tunnel to the FortiGate-300A appliance in the Camberwell data centre.</p>
<p>Small offices protected by the solution include fourteen Maternal and Child Health Centres, the Meals on Wheels centre, several public gardens and golf courses, and the local traffic school. The FortiWifi-50B appliances provide very flexible deployment options for the council, as units can be readily upgraded to directly connect to the Internet via a 3G mobile wireless Internet service.</p>
<p>Security settings on the FortiWifi-50B units automatically recognise specific computers that are allowed to access Council applications. The solution provides flexibility for teleworkers, by allowing secure access to data and applications via either wireless LAN or Ethernet connected computers. No configuration changes are needed on the computers themselves, greatly reducing support issues for help desk staff, and the likelihood of a problem for users. The FortiWifi-50B appliances can be connected to the Internet via a standard broadband Internet service, or via 3G mobile Internet services using an optional expansion.</p>
<p>In addition, the FortiWifi-50B appliances are configured to automatically limit any non-authorised computer that attaches to the network. When a non-authorised computer is detected, it is only allowed access to safe Internet sites. This greatly reduces the risk of unknown computers introducing security risks onto the Council network while also preventing unauthorised access to Council data. It also ensures that teleworking staff are still able to use any other computers they might have in their home, without preventing their legitimate Internet access.</p>
<p>FortiGate systems are ASIC-accelerated security appliances that integrate essential security applications such as antivirus, firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, Web filtering, anti-spam and traffic shaping. All FortiGate systems are kept up to date automatically by Fortinet's FortiGuard® Network, which helps provide protection against the most damaging, content-based threats from email and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, other unwanted network traffic and more - around the clock and around the world.</p>
<p>About City of Boroondara (www.boroondara.vic.gov.au)
The City of Boroondara is a local government body in the Australian state of Victoria. Located five kilometers east of the Melbourne Central Business District, Council administers sixty square kilometers of suburban Melbourne, providing services to a population of approximately 155,000 people and 13,000 businesses.</p>
<p>About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management, or UTM, security systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection--including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and anti-spam -- designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified in seven programs by ICSA Labs: Firewall, Antivirus, IPSec, SSL, Network IPS, and Anti-Spyware. Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.</p>
<p>###</p>
<p>Copyright © 2008 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved. The symbols ® and ™ denote respectively federally registered trademarks and unregistered trademarks of Fortinet, Inc., its subsidiaries and affiliates, including, but not limited to, the following trademarks: Fortinet, FortiGate, FortiGuard, FortiManager, FortiMail, FortiClient, FortiCare, FortiAnalyzer, FortiReporter, FortiOS, FortiASIC, FortiWiFi, FortiSwitch, FortiVoIP, FortiBIOS, FortiLog, FortiResponse, FortiDB, APSecure, and ABACAS. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.</p>
<p>Media Contact:
Sebastian Rice,
02 9959 1991,
seb@silverspan.com,
www.silverspan.com</p>

• Got more on this story? Email Computerworld
• Follow Computerworld on twitter