Forcepoint NGFW for a cloud company

OVERVIEW Founded in 1996, Cobweb Solutions offers a range of Cloud solutions including: Hosted Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Enterprise Mobility Suite, Azure, Power BI, Dynamics CRM, Hosted Desktop, Email Archiving, Email Encryption and Cloud Backup. Based in Fareham, Hampshire and Canary Wharf, London Cobweb provides Cloud solutions to over 6,000 SMBs and over 320 partners through Vuzion the new cloud aggregator business for resellers. An early adopter of Microsoft Exchange, Cobweb is a long-established provider of cloud communications and a gold-status member of the Microsoft Partner Network. CHALLENGE Cobweb provides hosted services for over 150,000 mailboxes, managing firewalls for hundreds of locations with complex, overlapping IP schemas. The impact of overlapping schemas to Cobweb and its customers created an inability to deliver the service to customers. “It’s a monumental task. Having easy-to-access insight into the whole system is a necessity. The company’s reputation hinges on its services being secure and constantly up and running.” — Julian Dyer, Chief Technical Officer, Cobweb Furthermore, Cobweb has to ensure that the environment is up-todate in order to manage a continually evolving threat landscape. Visits to perform data center upgrades in Segensworth, Fareham, and one in Telehouse, London were proving to be time intensive, and the company needed a system it could rely on to upgrade automatically. SOLUTION According to Dyer, the decision to migrate to Forcepoint Stonesoft Next Generation Firewall (NGFW)—part of the Forcepoint Security product offering—was not taken lightly. Cobweb wanted to move away from the expensive licensing model it had previously, and pay only for the features it needed. The deployment option of Stonesoft Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) for virtual versions of Stonesoft NGFW is the affordable licensing model Cobweb was looking for. In addition, centralized security management, combined with the flexibility to add security features such as a delegated local administrator and capacity, helped drive the decision to implement Stonesoft NGFW. “We were able to replace overlapping encryption domains with site-to-site VPNs that take minutes to configure. We simply use the domain feature to logically separate the organization, delegating local administrative control if we choose.” — Dyer RESULTS Implementing Stonesoft NGFW has enabled Cobweb to increase bandwidth, add connections, and aggregate across network links safely and securely, giving multiple seamless failover options. The single management platform provides admins with quicker response times to all change requests and any incidents that may occur on the network. Ultimately, with Stonesoft NGFW and centralized firewall management, Cobweb is now equipped with the tools to manage network security holistically in real-time mode, utilize shared network connections, and benefit from shared logging, reporting, auditing, and other tools. Ease-of-use makes Stonesoft NGFW an effective and efficient security solution, saving valuable time and resources for Cobweb. “No more standing in cold data centers for hours configuring a firewall or performing upgrades. Forcepoint Stonesoft Next Generation Firewall does 99% of our network configuration, reducing what used to take hours to minutes. Everything is done through the management platform. I am one happy customer.” — Dyer Cobweb has relied on Forcepoint solutions since 2012.