Firewall Hero Sandwich to the Rescue
When a giant global plastics manufacturer faced a super cyber threat landscape, SonicWall’s firewall “Hero Sandwich” came to the rescue. This powerful security solution of the SonicWall Firewall Sandwich was recently leveraged by our customer, a global enterprise network. The challenges faced by this customer were the same that all companies face today as the cyber threat landscape increases exponentially year over year. While vastly differing in scalability, architecture, and policy, cyber security is paramount to any business or corporation whether it be the local fast food merchant, multinational financial industry, or a government service or agency. As the customer’s network expanded, the network administrators desperately needed to augment their security protection and inspection for their Internet presence. While securing the gateway is fundamental, this did not take into account the ever increasing challenge that every network administrator faces today: protecting the network from the end users.
Every network with a mobile workforce is faced with the same inherent risk of the industry’s most elaborate and compromising cyber security breaches. Network admins must account for devices, often taken off-premises that have secure and trusted access to the corporate network generally beyond the gateway firewall. These devices are vulnerable when they connect to possibly unsecure public networks, or go to sites normally blocked by the corporate firewall or security policy. This trusted device then could compromise the corporate network once the device is reconnected to the internal network. A gateway solution does not account for this type of vulnerability.
The network administrator of the giant plastics manufacturer had to find a way to deliver security inspection and control for some 500 mobile devices while simultaneously securing a large datacenter serving over 5,000 global user workforce. While the manufacturer’s Internet connectivity is a 1 Gbps connection, this paled in comparison to the average per second throughput of their internal core network. Their core network on an average is moving 30 – 40 Gbps. The real challenge was identifying a security solution that could reach this high throughput demand, and provide a path to easily meet performance demands in the future without allowing latency in the network. Enter the SonicWall Firewall Sandwich to the rescue!
In this fluid design for this manufacturer, the network admin implemented four of the SonicWall SuperMassive 9800s in a single Firewall Sandwich deployment, our “Hero Sandwich”. With high performance SonicWall next-generation firewalls in place the customer could easily scale to their current 40 Gbps. Furthermore, the architecture of the SonicWall Firewall Sandwich enables the customer to easily scale this network by simply adding additional appliances over time as demand on throughput expands. Even speeds of 60, 100, even 300 Gbps and higher are easily deliverable with this solution. With the “Hero Sandwich” the network admin now has the ability to apply the industry’s best Application Control, Anti-Virus Inspection, Anti-Spyware Inspection, SSL Decryption, Botnet Inspection, and Intrusion Detection & Prevention on all traffic traversing his internal network. All these services are performed real-time on every packet, and without introducing any performance limitations or network latency. This particular network admin now has the ability to ensure the integrity of the internal network, even from internally introduced threats.
Here are some important questions you might want to ask yourself. Do you have similar network demands? Do you have a mobile workforce with devices coming and going on your internal network? Do you inspect inside-to-inside network activity? Are you able to monitor network applications, access, and user activity? Can you easily produce user activity and threat alert reports on inside LAN communications? Do you know what threats exist on your LAN today? The SonicWall Firewall Sandwich may be your solution, too. Download the tech brief and watch the Webinar and contact your SonicWall team today.
