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Somerville College is one of the University of Oxford colleges using Fortinet. When it needed more firewall throughput between its six VLANs, it decided to deploy a FortiGate-3016B network security appliance to replace its existing Cisco solution and drive multi-Gigabit traffic from each VLAN to its own physical port. Having added the optional IPS accelerator module to the FortiGate device, Somerville quickly activated the IPS, web content filtering and AV scanning functionalities available within the appliance, enabling cost savings via the replacement of expensively licensed Tipping Point and Websense investments, and all without impeding any of the College’s performance objectives.

“We wanted to improve speed for everybody on the network, and now we have all that extra bandwidth at less cost,” commented Christopher Bamber, IT Systems Manager. “There was no discernible performance impact when we applied all the new security rules across the VLANs. We also implemented the Fortinet FortiAnalyzer-400B analysis and reporting device which gives us the 60-day log information we need to help satisfy audit compliance, plus enormously granular forensic insights into any security event we wish to scrutinise.”

Elsewhere at the Business Services and & Projects section of Oxford University Administration and Services, the requirement for Fortinet was driven by concerns over database security. “We purchased Fortinet’s FortiDB to undertake broad vulnerability assessment across many database instances,” said John Toone, DBA Manager, Business Services and Projects. “We subsequently identified the need to audit and monitor (A&M) transactions within our Oracle Financials system. The proprietary Oracle A&M solution was expensive, so we chose the upgrade our FortiDB investment and have been very satisfied with the results.”

The FortiGate-3016B is the ideal education network security choice for core network multi-segment firewall implementations. Capable of firewall throughput of up to 20Gbps, the FortiGate-3016B also supports IPS throughput of 2Gbps (UDP) and has capacity for 1 million concurrent sessions. Connectivity is delivered via 16 ASIC-accelerated GbE SFP interfaces, while its various hot swappable elements help ensure maximum availability. With the FortiGuard® subscription services, the institution benefits from automated, real-time, and up-to-date protection against security threats.

The FortiAnalyzer-400B is a powerful logging, analysing and reporting appliance that rapidly determines an organisation’s overall security stance and helps assure a broad range of regulatory compliance. The system also provides advanced security management functions such as quarantined file archiving, event correlation, network vulnerability assessments, traffic analysis, and archiving of email, Web access, instant messaging, and file transfer content.

Fortinet’s FortiDB is the most comprehensive solution to help secure databases and applications such as ERP, CRM and SCM for both virtualised and non-virtualised environments, supporting vulnerability management, database activity monitoring, data loss prevention, automation of auditing and compliance, database change control. Available in a scalable, high performance range of appliance form-factors, FortiDB can also be deployed as software on industry-standard platforms – as it is at Oxford University Business Services.

“Fortinet has a worldwide reputation in the education sector, so it is fitting that IT professionals within an illustrious institution such as Oxford University also place their trust in our technology,” commented Paul Judd, Regional Director UKIZA at Fortinet. “These nine deployments across Oxford University illustrate how our end-to-end security suite is addressing the needs of demanding multi-Gigabit environments that counter multiple, blended threat vectors with a very intelligent approach.”