Fortinet – a leading network
security provider and worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM)
solutions – today announced that Barfoot & Thompson, New Zealand’s largest privately
owned real estate company, has deployed FortiGate-60B appliances at its branch
locations in New Zealand. Barfoot & Thompson has also deployed Fortinet’s analysis
and management appliances, FortiAnalyzer and FortiManager.
Barfoot &
Thompson is New Zealand’s
largest privately owned real estate company. The company has more than 1,200
salespeople in 65 branches selling residential, lifestyle/rural and commercial
real estate throughout Auckland and Northland, and residential property managers
in 51 of its branches. Barfoot & Thompson is the market leader in Auckland selling
around one in three homes sold by real estate agents.
Barfoot &
Thompson’s previous network security solution was complex and expensive to
operate, incorporating dual dedicated bandwidth to branch offices, as well as outsourced
firewall and outsourced Web filtering services. After consulting with their
partner Datacom, New Zealand’s largest locally owned full service IT company, Barfoot
& Thompson decided to evaluate network security solutions from several
major vendors. After carefully evaluating performance, reliability and security
capabilities, the Fortinet solution was found to outperform other security appliances,
achieving higher throughput while identifying more security threats. The
Fortinet solution also allowed Barfoot & Thompson to consolidate and
simplify their complex mix of in-house and outsourced network security and
hosting arrangements.
“I was surprised by the level of functionality
and performance available in the Fortinet network security appliances. With the
FortiGate appliances we have been able to enormously reduce our data network
costs, improve data transfer speeds, and improve data security,” said Simon Casey, Chief Information Officer at Barfoot
& Thompson. “The Fortinet appliances have simplified
our network architecture, and we’re confident that the Fortinet appliances will
block any malicious traffic trying to get into our network.”
Barfoot &
Thompson started its Fortinet deployment with two pilot sites followed by a
project phase deployed at 10 branches. During the deployment phase they were
able to standardise and automate many of the tasks associated with the deployment
to each branch office. Success with this phase gave business stakeholders the confidence
to support a full rollout to all other branch offices.
Since the initial pilot, Barfoot &
Thompson has deployed FortiGate-60B appliances to all of its 65 branch offices.
The appliances have been configured to provide intrusion protection, antivirus,
antispyware, Web filtering, VPN connectivity to the head office, load balancing
and failover between ADSL lines. Barfoot & Thompson can now add wireless
network failover at anytime.
FortiManager-400B centralised management
appliance and the FortiAnalyzer-400 centralised reporting solutions are
reducing management complexity and allow for much more detailed analysis of
network usage as well as easily and automatically creating monthly and ad hoc
network reports.
“Distributed
enterprises need to protect their networks as much as core networks do. Just because data isn’t
sitting at the corporate headquarters doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be
protected,” said Charlie Cote, regional
director for Fortinet Australian and New Zealand. “Fortinet’s end-to-end
security solutions allow enterprises like Barfoot & Thompson to protect
critical assets no matter where they sit within the network infrastructure.”
Fortinet’s FortiGate systems are
ASIC-accelerated security appliances that integrate essential security and
network functionalities such as firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, Web
filtering, antivirus, anti-spam, data leakage protection, application control,
traffic shaping and WAN acceleration. All FortiGate systems are kept up to date
automatically by Fortinet’s FortiGuard® Network, which helps ensure 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.
