Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 39 | Page 60

CASE STUDY

THE FORTINET SECURE SD-BRANCH SOLUTION EXCEEDED OUR REQUIREMENTS FOR FUNCTIONALITY AND PRICE PERFORMANCE .

in the world are useless without a reliable and secure infrastructure to run them on .” branch , potentially increasing the complexity of branch office deployment .
To achieve the greatest flexibility and price performance , the IT team opted for a Software-Defined Wide-Area Network ( SD-WAN ) architecture . In addition to the inherent cost savings of switching to SD-WAN , it would also provide the local branches with the Internet access that some of the new services required .
The challenge , however , was to implement this without introducing vulnerabilities in the expanded attack surface created by SD-WAN . With the old network , security had been imposed centrally , and since all traffic was backhauled through the data centre , it was deemed secure .
For the new SD-WAN , a common centrally defined security policy would now be applied at every remote
Deployment and management
With the network extending across more than 1,800 fuel stations – many in remote rural locations – another key criterion was the ability to manage every part of the network from a central location with new deployments requiring as little on-premises intervention as possible .
This was especially important considering that the common security policies applied at every branch would have to be updated as new services were introduced . If every device deployment and reconfiguration required the local presence of a skilled network engineer , the investment in time and resources could escalate quickly .
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