Cybersecurity for Retail Group in UAE and Oman

A Secure and Reliable network established across the enterprise of a leading Retail Group in UAE & Oman

Our client is a leading retail chain, having operations across UAE and Oman. The Group was running a network of legacy appliances and were facing issues with performance, reliability and increasing renewal expenditure. Fortigate based latest Next Generation Firewalls are implemented replacing the legacy appliances resulting in improved performance, increased reliability & reduced operating costs.

Business Scenario

The Group was faced with a challenge of running a network comprising of legacy appliances which had a direct risk associated with the availability of critical business services. Since all the stores were connected to the central datacenter for all transactions, uninterrupted network connectivity was of utmost importance. The performance, availability and security of the service were of key importance for ensuring that the business is not impacted. Also in an event of any hardware failure, there was no standby appliance available, leading to direct business loss in event of hardware failure. To meet their strategic goal for improving service quality, reliability and efficiency, the Group engaged with Intertec to design, install & support the firewall based corporate network.

A detail study of the customer’s IT infrastructure was done along with a detailed analysis of the possible points of failure, they were identified which were later eliminated by the proposed solution design. We followed a consultative approach, wherein the technical specialists studied their IT requirements and suggested the best possible solution.

Intertec proposed revamping the network infrastructure and replacing the existing legacy appliances with the new Fortigate Next Generation Firewalls. The customer had all the critical servers hosted in a centralized data center where all the financial and operational systems were hosted.

Challenges

  • Ageing hardware with nearing End-of-Support
  • Lower network performance and reliability
  • Higher renewal prices for legacy appliances
  • No stand-by appliances in stores impacting business in event of failure

Solution

All the stores were connected in real-time to the centralized datacenter for transactions via a VPN connection. In case of any failure in the network connectivity there was a direct impact on the business. To ensure better performance & reliability, the centralized datacenter firewall which accepted connections from all the stores was replaced with a latest generation firewall. Similarly, all the firewalls in the stores were also replaced with the latest generation firewall, resulting in improved network performance & reliability. There were also a centralized management & log aggregation component present in the network, which was recommended to be upgraded to the latest version, since it’s functioning had no impact on the core requirement of secure and uninterrupted network connectivity.

As a result, the major advantages that were gained on deploying the Fortigate Next Generation Firewall in the network were:

  • Highly secure and reliable network connectivity from all the stores to the central datacenter.
  • Improved network performance and end-user experience
  • Elimination of possible downtime related risks due to ageing hardware nearing end-of-support
  • Reduced costs on renewals of the legacy hardware

Result

  • Latest appliances with newer firmware resulting in increased performance & reliability
  • Reduced renewal expenditure
  • Availability of spare appliance to ensure uninterrupted  connectivity to datacenter