WatchGuard tips out Cisco at NNTT

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 03 February 2009 04:02

IT Industry - Market

Secure networking provider WatchGuard Technologies has been chosen to supply the National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT) with a secure site-to-site Virtual Private Network, in the process kicking out the incumbent supplier Cisco.

The NNTT is an Australian Government agency set up under the Native Title Act 1993 to assist with the resolution of native title issues. Under the agreement, Watchguard and Perth-based integrator, Expanse IT will implement the network for NNTT's mobile workforce requirements and distributed network of offices.

The WatchGuard deployment includes two Firebox X Peak 5500e Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances units which will be implemented in the organisation’s Perth and Melbourne head offices. 

In addition, six Firebox X Edge e-Series55e units will be installed at remote office locations, including Melbourne, Sydney, Cairns, Darwin, Brisbane & Adelaide.

According to Watchguard, these appliances are capable of fully integrated unified threat management, have no user limits and provide 100Mbps firewall throughput and 35 Mbps VPN throughput.  They also include Anti-spyware, Anti-spam, Anti-virus, URL filtering, intrusion prevention and deep application inspection.

Martin Dart, Information Services Manager at the National Native Title Tribunal, said, “We’re building a WAN in the cloud using WatchGuard and its VPN tunneling technology as our primary links. The deployment will also facilitate high availability which the organisation needs to ensure uptime, complete with load balancing and redundancy.”

The WatchGuard Peak appliances aim to provide secure access to the Internet and centrally held corporate data from remote locations, including business files, email and web applications. Around 50 laptop users and all teleworkers will also have access to centrally held data through point-to-point access on the VPN. 

“WatchGuard will also easily integrate with our in-house software and WAN/LAN configurations, and we have  confidence in its ability to manage all of our email and web browsing traffic needs.” says Dart.

The Firebox Peak appliances replace Cisco PIX firewalls and a private IP WAN which operated across six interstate offices on  slow 96-384KB TPIPS links.  According to NNTT, the Cisco system was unable to provide the cost-effective connectivity required to scale in line with the organisation’s remote workforce requirements, and a desire to develop new intranet-based web applications. 

“The Cisco firewalls were also inflexible as they had hard coded routing, and we would have required additional devices to achieve full threat protection. We needed control and manageability of our logs and ubiquitous ability from our VPN to facilitate connections from anywhere, anyime.  With WatchGuard, our employees can use their home PCs to connect to the server via a simple but secure management console.

“WatchGuard will now form our gateway to route traffic to where it is required to go. In addition, as part of our strategy to ensure business continuity, Melbourne will act as a mirror site to Perth. If Perth goes down, our interstate clients will retain connectivity to Melbourne, with the Firebox replicated and with access to another internet connection for redundancy,” says Dart.

WatchGuard Peak appliances offer zero day protection out of the box, with up to two-gigabit-per-second firewall throughput.

In addition, real-time monitoring will be available for the organisation to troubleshoot problems in real time. Centralised management also aims to enable the organisation to enforce security policies across all locations and users.