“We wanted an all-inclusive solution that would allow us to sonsolidate management of the entire security infrastructure".
Ciro Famoso, Manager of the Information Systems
Uninterrupted availability of services to the city’s inhabitants and secure communications for the City of Monza thanks to Arkoon’s protection technology.
The City of Monza has about 121,500 inhabitants and covers a territory of about 33 square kilometers—7.7 of which are occupied by the park—broken down into 5 decentralized districts.
The requirement
The City of Monza decided in 2003 to implement an infrastructure for total security, which was very modern for the time. Indeed, at a time when the trend was still to install various single-purpose solutions (antivirus, firewall, web filter, etc.) in order to confront the various security problems (with all the management complications this entailed), the City of Monza instead decided to transition from a solution based on technology from different producers to the solution by the French company Arkoon, at the time the only one in Italy offering all-in-one technology that, with a single device (appliance), provided all the primary functionalities for protecting the corporate network.
Over the years, the market has evolved and other companies specializing in information system security have come to offer all-in-one solutions of this type, but the City of Monza has always remained faithful to Arkoon, upgrading its solution over time and recently installing a cluster version of the French company’s technology, that is, a duplicated protection solution that guarantees uninterrupted service even in the event of a failure.
The solution
As a result of the recent enhancement of its Internet security infrastructure, the City of Monza now has 36 Arkoon systems protecting the operations of 600 internal users of the administration, as well as the continuity of the services provided to more than 121,000 inhabitants.
The new solution consists of two A2200X FAST360 appliances in cluster configuration (that is, with the second machine going into operation only if there is a failure of the first) located at the main location and 35 smaller A51 and A20 FAST360 appliances installed in the remote offices—procurement office, environment office, territorial districts, park administration, culture office, etc.—which protect the VPN connection to the main office, thus ensuring the provision of all services, documents, and information to the city’s inhabitants who request them from the administration.
The A2200Xs installed at the main office are very powerful machines equipped with VPN accelerators capable of handling a very high level of traffic.
With this easy-to-manage series of all-in-one appliances, the City of Monza now has a veritable center for security and protection against web threats, which includes a firewalling system with full stateful inspection and application inspection functions (that is, controlling incoming traffic on the application level), a proxy server, antivirus, URL filtering (web browsing control based on categories and a black and white list), Quality of Service, that is, the prioritizing of traffic in order to reserve more bandwidth for the most critical applications (for example, web browsing which requires an immediate response) and less for the less critical (such as messaging), and bandwidth management which, when there are two or more Internet connections, dynamically selects the best available line in the particular moment, making the switch from one to the another automatically without any manual intervention by the technicians.
Another key component is the availability of a single management console that is extremely easy to use by the security administrators. In this environment, simplicity also means that the amount of usage training for the technical staff could be reduced to a minimum with obvious benefits in terms of cost. Using this single console, the security administrator has a complete and immediate picture—by means of reports and graphics—of intrusion attempts, traffic volume and quality, and all other events related to the security of the organization on the central level and at the remote locations.
Why city of Monza choose Arkoon
“We wanted an all-inclusive solution that would allow us to consolidate management of the entire security infrastructure and manage it from a centralized point without the need for technicians to go to the remote offices for configurations or to solve problems. Arkoon was the only one that could offer us all this in 2003. Then, over the years we decided to remain with the French company’s technology because it demonstrated its ability to grow with us by always responding in a timely manner to new requirements, right up to the cluster solution that we have just installed,” explains Ciro Famoso, head of the information systems department of the City of Monza. “The opening of the Italian subsidiary also helped shorten the response times.”
All-in-one solutions such as Arkoon’s allow organizations to avoid the nuisance and cost of acquiring disparate products from various suppliers (firewall, antivirus, web filtering, etc.), all with their own different management interface and all to be integrated and administered individually. Furthermore, Arkoon allows for simple remote management of the security infrastructure, allowing organizations to administer security at a central location or to hand this task over to an external partner with all the economic and organizational benefits that this brings.
The Partner
The system integrator SoftJam has been one of Arkoon’s Italian partners for some time and is able to provide added value to the company’s technology through the support it provides to clients in the phases of decision-making, installation, scaling, and customization of the solution. SoftJam has been offering Arkoon’s products in Italy since 2003 when the French company did not yet have a local office, and today it can boast a client fleet of more than 60 companies that employ from 10 to hundreds of employees.
SoftJam was created in Genoa in 1996 as a consulting firm specializing in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) with the objective of providing services, support, development, and training. SoftJam now presents itself as a top-notch technology partner for companies requiring services with a high added value for the creation, management, support, and maintenance of high-quality information systems.
