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One of the oldest and largest media houses in India, the Hindustan Times Group owns and runs two of the largest newspapers in India-the Hindustan Times in English and the Hindustan in Hindi.With networking and IT playing a critical role in its daily operations as well in its growth, it is obvious that protection of IT assets from malicious attacks and threats will always be of paramount importance for the group.
Hindustan Times has users spread across 15 locations in India who access application like emails, Intranet and Internet resources through the corporate data center located in New Delhi. It has a huge pool of WAN as well as Internet bandwidth terminating in New Delhi to satisfy the end user requirements. "We were looking forward to a robust and a scalable solution which could help us prevent our internal environment against external attacks, like Operating System vulnerabilities, viruses, worms and unauthorized intrusion," says Amit Khanna of Hindustan Times. To use its Internet resources better Hindustan Times also wanted to implement a solution to allow only legitimate use of Internet bandwidth, he adds.
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| At a Glance |
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Challenges
n HT wanted to prevent their internal environment against external attacks, like Operating System vulnerabilities, viruses, worms and unauthorized intrusion
n Company's operations across 15 locations posed another challenge
Solution
n ASIC based architecture design
n Multi-level Unified Threat Management
Benefits
n Prevention of threats from virus and worms
n Check on intrusion threats and remove vulnerabilities from entering the internal environment
n Attacks handled at the gateway level
n Better utilization of Internet resources
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With these challenges in mind, Hindustan Times wanted a solution that will not only help prevent attacks and intrusions in its network but also a solution that will help it better utilize the Internet resources. "In mid 2006 when we looked at the Fortinet product profile it appeared to suit our requirements. We underwent tests and PUC at various levels to justify our needs," Khanna says.
According to Khanna, the Fortinet solution after being deployed helped Hindustan Times achieve what it desired. "The solution helped us provide a mechanism to minimize attacks or threats specified above at the gateway level. It also provided us with a tool to implement a global content filtering solution to help us use our Internet resources in a better way," points out Khanna. He says that the solution which was designed in a high availability mode intends to provide 100% uptime to prevent any such future attacks.
Before zeroing in on Fortinet, Hindustan Times evaluated various other solutions based on the similar architecture running on software and hardware platform. So what made Hindustan Times go for the Fortinet solution? "The key advantages which made Fortinet as a preference in our case was the ASIC based architecture design, Multi-level Unified Threat Management and support and service from the channel partners," explains Khanna.
The Fortinet solution has helped Hindustan Times prevent all kinds of threats from virus and worms, and check intrusion and vulnerabilities from entering its internal environment. Overall, with Fortinet, Khanna is confident of handling all attacks or threats at the gateway level itself. "Any such threat is killed in the DMZ before it hits our internal resources. The primary benefit that we desired from such a solution was to provide a layer of security to our end user's from new attacks at the gateway level itself. This goal we have achieved after the Fortinet implementation," Khanna says.
Talking about future, Khanna says that he is looking at security architecture at branch level and is looking forward to implement solutions in a similar manner at various levels on the company's Intranet.
Team DQ
dqmail@cybermedia.co.in
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