Barfoot & Thompson secures distributed network

New Zealand’s largest privately owned real-estate company, Barfoot & Thompson, has deployed Fortinet’s analysis and management appliances, FortiAnalyzer and FortiManager to secure its network.

Barfoot & Thompson has more than 1200 salespeople in 65 branches selling residential, lifestyle/rural and commercial real estate throughout Auckland and Northland and has residential property managers in 51 of its branches.

Barfoot & Thompson’s previous network security solution was complex and expensive to operate, incorporating dual dedicated bandwidth to branch offices, as well as outsourced firewall and outsourced web filtering services. After consulting with its partner Datacom, a locally owned, full-service IT company, Barfoot & Thompson decided to evaluate network security solutions from several major vendors. After carefully evaluating performance, reliability and security capabilities, the Fortinet solution was found to outperform other security appliances, achieving higher throughput while identifying more security threats.

The Fortinet solution also allowed Barfoot & Thompson to consolidate and simplify their complex mix of in-house and outsourced network security and hosting arrangements.

“I was surprised by the level of functionality and performance available in the Fortinet network security appliances. With the FortiGate appliances, we have been able to enormously reduce our data network costs, improve data transfer speeds and improve data security,” said Simon Casey, Chief Information Officer at Barfoot & Thompson.

“The Fortinet appliances have simplified our network architecture and we’re confident that the appliances will block any malicious traffic trying to get into our network.”

Barfoot & Thompson started its Fortinet deployment with two pilot sites, followed by a project phase deployed at 10 branches. During the deployment phase they were able to standardise and automate many of the tasks associated with the deployment to each branch office. Success with this phase gave business stakeholders the confidence to support a full rollout to all other branch offices.

Since the initial pilot, Barfoot & Thompson has deployed FortiGate-60B appliances to all of its 65 branch offices. The appliances have been configured to provide intrusion protection, antivirus, antispyware, web filtering, VPN connectivity to the head office, load balancing and failover between ADSL lines. Barfoot & Thompson can now add wireless network failover at any time.

FortiManager-400B centralised management appliance and the FortiAnalyzer-400 centralised reporting solutions are reducing management complexity and allow for much more detailed analysis of network usage, as well as easily and automatically creating monthly and ad hoc network reports.