Business Objective and Benefits: To provide a powerful and easily managable firewall gateway appliance for an education college to allow students to be offered the most advanced online learning facilities available.

Products and Services used: Check Point firewall with Nokia IP530 security appliance and Presence Professional Services.

This college places a particular emphasis on the use of information and communications technology as mediums for learning and has an unusually high ratio of computers per student.

The college has used Check Point security software to control the gateway to the Internet for several years but continued expansion of the college network and increasing bandwidth requirements meant that the gateway system, a Windows NT based system, was unable to cope with any more traffic.

Although Presence was not the original supplier of the Check Point system to the college, we had been supporting the service for the college and had developed a close working relationship. It was natural that they should ask us to make recommendations to upgrade the firewall to cope with the existing and projected demands on the system.

Our recommendation was to install a Nokia firewall appliance and upgrade the Check Point software to the latest version with its improved management system. The appliance we recommended is the Nokia IP530 running Check Point FireWall-1 NG. The solution was installed with minimal downtime and provides greatly improved throughput by removing the bottleneck caused by the old platform. The new system will be able to scale to cater for many additional users and devices within the college network as well as increases in bandwidth as demand increases.

The outcome is that the college now has a firewall service that can handle all the projected future demands on the college network with an administration system that is easy to control by the college’s network manager.